[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-frameworks-devel
Subject:    Re: Review Request 126078: [OS X] modernising the KIdleTime plugin (WIP!)
From:       René_J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin () gmail ! com>
Date:       2015-11-19 13:38:06
Message-ID: 4075547.xTUq3sbkDk () patux
[Download RAW message or body]

There's something else that's been bothering me since I realised it: KIdleTime has \
been written with the assumption that'll always work, and that whatever \
initialisation is required never fails. That must be why the return value from \
setupPoller() is discarded.

Maybe this all holds true on Linux, where initialisation probably only fails if \
there's no valid connection to an X server or a severe out-of-memory condition. The \
former will lead to sufficient explicative feedback to the user, the latter, well, \
it'd still be nice to simply print a message and then exit without triggering crash \
reporting stuff that's only going to increase the system load.

On OS X, there is a very valid situation in which initialisation could (or should) \
fail and that cannot be predicted from something like the absence of an env. variable \
like DISPLAY : remote login. That's a more generic problem that affects Qt \
applications in general, though.

Anyway, I don't see anything in the documentation that suggests that applications can \
verify whether any of the KIdleTime features are going to work (= are implemented). \
Idle time is reported as 0 when there is no platform plugin (which is a valid time, \
not an error value), or whatever the platform plugin returns if it cannot determine a \
sensible value. The other, signalling features probably just fail to deliver signals \
if they are not supported. I haven't seen a warning for that in the documentation, so \
that could lead to 2 things:

- either dependent software just never gets to do the (possibly important) things it \
                is designed to do when an idle period ends or reaches a given \
                duration.
- or developers deduce that they have to write additional checks, possibly through \
polling to detect and handle situation in which KIdleTime fails to do its job ... but \
then why would they even use KIdleTime at all?

R.
_______________________________________________
Kde-frameworks-devel mailing list
Kde-frameworks-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-frameworks-devel


[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]