On 04/21/2013 12:40 PM, Kevin Krammer wrote:
On Saturday, 2013-04-20, James Tyrer wrote:
On 04/19/2013 10:11 PM, Duncan wrote:
that no longer has a real maintainer, and that is simply being
held together by hacks from some other kde dev when something
breaks, until it eventually gets to be no longer worth
maintaining, would explain the hacks you see in the code, etc.
This might explain why it wasn't fixed, but doesn't explain why it
was written wrong to begin with.
It might not have been that way originally. Some things get added
later on due to changes in the environment, e.g. XDG based paths
becoming available, or original implementors might not have been
aware of standard paths and somebody else added it, etc.
One would basically have to traverse the whole commit history in
order to understand why something is implemented the way it is.
It does appear to be related to XDG and there is the tale. In
kget/core/kget.cpp a default directory of $XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR was added.
However, although the coder appears to be skilled at writing C++, he was
not skilled at actual programing. He hard coded the name of this
"Group" as: "My Downloads" and chose an inappropriate _global_ icon, but
none for that group. Rather than using the name of the
$XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR directory as the default for the name of the "Group"
and the directory's icon, if one was chosen, or otherwise:
"folder-download" as the default icon. As well as using "folder" as the
global default icon for the "Groups".
The code uses the name of the "Group" ("My Downloads") for a flag. This
is poor design. The name of the group should be renameable and there
should be a Boolean flag in the structure to indicate that the "Group"
is the default group.
Also, since this is to be the default Group, the: "Regular expression"
window should say "Default" rather than "*movies*" and it should not be
changeable since all downloads not going to other groups go to the
default group.
In short, it needs work. I have to say that today I am well enough to
help someone to design it and to tutor someone that knows C++ better
than I do with the actual programing. But, I am not well enough to fix
it myself -- to do the coding -- yet. Maybe I will get better, maybe not.
Meanwhile, kde5 aka kde frameworks is being designed to be far
more modular, and already they're gradually splitting up the
formerly huge monolithic tarballs into individual repos, with
the core desktop
intended to be much smaller and all these individual apps that
are
now part of the six-month core kde update and release cycle, will
probably be shipped separately and updated on their own
schedule.
Does this mean that KDE-4 is already being abandoned by the
developers?
No.
Rhetorical question, and not really to be taken literally.
Do you think that there is any chance that KDE-5 will ever work, or
will it just be the same story?
It is quite likely that there won't be such as thing as KDE-5.
Experience has shown that the benefits of releasing multiple
independent products together, e.g. more media attention, is
nowadays outweighted by drawbacks such as people misunderstanding
relations or their absence between different products.
I may have acted strange in the past few years due to a stroke, but I
still have SJS (Steve Jobs Syndrome) and I was born that way. I just
have this strange idea that things should work very well, not just 80%
to 90% and I would like to see KDE develop a release process that could
produce a 99% working product as well as producing new nifty features.
--
James Tyrer
Linux (mostly) From Scratch
--
James Tyrer
Linux (mostly) From Scratch
___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde-linux mailing list.
Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-linux.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
