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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Journalling
From:       "Rik Hemsley" <rikkus () postmaster ! co ! uk>
Date:       1999-02-20 0:00:40
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Peter Silva wrote:
> sounds cool, but the word "Journalling" in file system and DB circles
> means much more than this.  It would be better to call the daemon
> something like recentd, and provide an "Open Recent" extension to the file
> dialog.

What journalling means to kernel hackers and DB types is irrelevant to KDE
users. The word journal, to a non-technical person, means - put simply - a
log of recent events. Therefore the journal in the file dialog means the log
of recent files.

I actually got the idea from M$ Outlook, which does a similar thing, but the
implementation is crap and the user interface for looking back in the
journal is inconsistent (surprise).

M$ showed again their ignorance of other departments within their
corporation as this marvellous feature has not been integrated into Win98.

Ok here's the new situation with this, and the plan:

I've ditched the IPC messaging and the daemon as:
a) I can't be sure they'll be available on all KDE platforms, or reliable
b) They're not necessary.

The implementation is now that the journal part of the file dialog does the
writing to the journal, which is separate files rather than a single one.
This obviates the need to worry about locking.

I'd like some feedback on the following:

How about using this to provide a recent files menu for every KDE app that
wants it ?

Writing a recent files menu involves some thinking and some developers don't
bother.

If the developer could create a QPopupMenu and then ask the journal system
to update it, this would allow all apps to use what is supposed to be a
standard interface feature. There'd be no excuse for not doing it, and if a
developer didn't, at least it'd be easy for another person to add.

It seems to be simple to implement. The journal records timestamp, app name
and filename. All that would have to be done is to look through the journal
and pick out the last n entries that match appname.

N.B.
Richard Moore suggested this could be a more powerful version of the Windows
documents menu. I think it could be used to populate the recent document
menu. The 'recent' section of kdisknav (or whatever it's called) doesn't
work for anything that's not launched from the panel (I think), so we could
do it properly.

For Paul Campbell:
The journal feature is now off by default, and can be configured from a
dialog accessed from the journal dialog, together with the location of the
journal.

Another note in case I forgot to mention this before:
I've made a tiny app that can write a journal entry. This can be called from
any program, thus adding KDE journalling to any legacy apps. For example, I
use a BufReadPost command in Vim to call the program with the loaded
filename as argument.

That's it I think
Cheers,
Rik

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