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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: thoughts about features
From:       Chris Ross <devel () tebibyte ! org>
Date:       2001-02-12 14:31:05
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Shared memory was only half the story. The other half is a consistent and
intuitive way of embedding say a selected region of a spreadsheet as a
table in a wordprocessor by simply dragging it for the spreasheet window
into the wordprocessor window. Using a suitable message protocol allows
the applications to say more meaningful things than just "please open this
temporary file", such as "please embed this KPart here". It's true that
RISC OS uses shared memory as a way of avoiding go to disk, but it also
uses it so that changes to the original spreasheet are reflected in the
wordprocessor. Even in RISC OS the disk penalty is often avoided if the
transfer goes through !Scrap or pipefs: RISC OS isn't Unix, but it does
have disk buffers!

Regards,
Chris R.

On Mon, 12 Feb 2001, Pete Goodliffe wrote:
> Being a RISC OS user this idea really stikes a chord with me, and I
> believe that would be a very intuiitive addition to KDE. However,
> 
> Chris Ross wrote:
> > It would be nice to implement the RISC OS message protocol so that the
> > applications can negotiate over shared memory and such, thus avoiding a
> > lot of overhead and enabling greater functionality like live, in-situ
> > updates. It's not essential to change anything though, even in RISC OS if
> > the destination application does not respond to the messages the OS simply
> > tells the sender to save to a temporary file and tells the destination to
> > open it (just as though it had been double clicked or dragged by the
> > user).
> 
> I do wonder whether it's worth the complication of something like
> the RISC OS message protocol for saving. The idea of this was to support
> in memory transfer to speed inter-application saves. However, with
> reasonable disk buffering there would probably be no performance
> penalty with a "disk" transfer, the data would never make it to the disk.
> 
> Add to that the possibility that if you transfer a big file via shared
> memory you'd probably cause memory to be swapped to disk; you've lost the
> benefit already.
> 
> Remember Unix IS different fundamentally to RISC OS, no matter how good
> the RISC OS GUI is.
> 
> However, it would be nice to see something more like the RISC OS icon bar
> presence for applications and the drag-and-drop saving, for sure.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Pete
> 
> -- 
> Pete Goodliffe, Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology plc                     Tel: +44 (0) 1223 518579
> 645 Newmarket Road                            Fax: +44 (0) 1223 518526
> Cambridge, CB5 8PB, United Kingdom            WWW: http://www.pace.co.uk/
>  
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