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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    System Configure tool
From:       Charles Samuels <charles () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-05-04 18:26:56
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Upon reading the latest article at The Dot, I've come to the conclusion that 
we need to write a Generic System Configuration tool.

And I'm now volunteering to kickstart it, despite the fact that I promised to 
not :)

But before I begin, I want volunteers to help out.  At least 2 more people 
other than myself :)

Isn't this the responsibility of the vendors?  Yes, and no.  Yes, because 
they're the jerkwads that can't decide on the standard for configuring these 
things, but no, because they're a) incompetent and can never do it right and 
b) we want the best for our users and ourselves.  Or at least I think we do 
on point b... ;)

How do I indend to acheive this?  We'll be abstracting both the configure 
system, and the user-interface. and both of these components will be 
dlopened.  This is to make it possible to have a console version, and a KDE 
version, with the same configuration backend.  You want a console version for 
only a few specific modules, particularly stuff to configure the X server ;)  
Welcome is the other tools, however.

First, on app startup, it reads all the .desktop files, and creates the 
kcontrol-like tree (and similarly on the console).  If I click on an item on 
the tree, it looks for the associated .desktop file, in it, it looks for the 
UI front-end that corresponds to the mode of the app (in our case, an X type 
frontend).  Then it tries to the backend corresponding to the system, tells 
the frontend of the backend to use, and "executes" the frontend.

This method, thereby, allows all backends to have the same user-interface.

Why am I not abstracting the "widgets" as well?  Why should we?  We're 
supporting KDE-only, last I checked, this _is_ KDE, and we'll be linking to 
Qt anyway, and the added complexity is not worth the benefit.  And this 
method will also make it possible to later add auto-generating 
user-interfaces.


-Charles


-- 
Charles Samuels <charles@kde.org>
K Desktop Environment
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
 -- Jonas E. Salk, when asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine.

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