From kde-core-devel  Thu Nov 04 17:51:20 1999
From: Stephan Kulow <coolo () kde ! org>
Date: Thu, 04 Nov 1999 17:51:20 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: The filedialog, please read
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=94173791832462

pbrown@redhat.com wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, David Faure wrote:
> 
> > - configuration dialogs are good, yes, even for a file dialog
> 
> OK this is crap in my opinion. :)  You should set single/double click in
> one unified location, but not in the dialog itself.
> 
> Again, we need to think in terms of the user's view, not the
> implementation view...
> 
OK, where has this unique location been in KDE 1?

I am not really sure what's this all about. While I clean up the dirt
within KDE people come and complain that the only piece of code I'm
really interested in is unmaintained. 

I have no problem with a QFileDialog based solution, if it works the
way KFileDialog works - which basicly means different than the windows
solution. :)
I realize that to implement new features one would make KFileDialog
more and more a copy of QFileDialog - so it's definitly the better
idea to base it right away on QFileDialog. But this means that we
definitly need to implement our own views and to customize the GUI.
I want mimetype checking - this needs dynamical views. The way the
QFileDialog works you need to know the pixmap at insertion time
(QIconProvider is called then if installed). But this just wouldn't
get it. 
Then people want mime type selection - which is definitly something
people would love (even Windows can't give it to you). But this needs
completly new sorting routines. We need to customize the view, the
way QFileDialog handles URLs (we have kio - Qt has QNetworkProtocols),
etc. 
So after all we make QFileDialog more and more of our own class.
And the past showed, that this leads to problems and hacks (how often
have you heared "yes, the next Qt version will bring that. Qt x.x
will come out in two month"?).

There _are_ new high level classes within Qt's file dialog the KDE
file dialog can and will use. Just the glue will be different :)
But give me the time to investigate this topics - the whole topic
is about as old as KDE-II (when we switched to the newer Qt with
the better features[tm] :) and there were certainly other problems
to solve than that.

Greetings, Stephan

-- 
As long as Linux remains a religion of freeware fanatics,
Microsoft have nothing to worry about.  
                       By Michael Surkan, PC Week Online