hi :)

On April 23, 2010, Jonathan Riddell wrote:

> Aaron Seigo has offered to do a tutorial on Plasma Desktop Scripting.

> He's proposing a session of around two hours on IRC to show desktop

> scripting to distribution developers and anyone else who's interested.

thanks for spearheading this.

a bit more info for those on kde-packager: if you package the KDE Plasma Desktop you really, really want to get this information.

plasma-desktop now uses Javascript for its default layout and setup.

it also uses Javascript for configuration updates: kconfig_update, due to how KConfig itself works, and plasma-desktop are simply not compatible with each other and it is unlikely that will change. so configuration updates will (and are already, actually) pushed as Javascript.

in 4.5 there is now no more hard coded layouts in the c++ code at all and we've also introduced the idea of "templates" which are Javascript bundles that let us define how to lay out pretty much anything in plasma-desktop that we wish to. they also show up in the desktop context menu under Add Panel and will be exposed in the new Activity Manager.

this means that this information is pretty much key to being able to ensure a proper first-log-in experience for your users. it also opens the way for anyone with even a small amount of scripting experience to be able to mold plasma-desktop into what your audience wants.

but unless we get this information out there and in your hands and heads, this move from "edit a configuration file" to simple but powerful scripting will never achieve what it can. so please come, one and all, who are involved in creating KDE Plasma Workspace packages for downstream distributions, private deployments, etc.

you'll also be happy to know that there is good documentation for this growing area of Plasma here:

http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/PlasmaDestkopScripting

--

Aaron J. Seigo

humru othro a kohnu se

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KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks