Re: file list and other things

Hi Jowenn,

On Monday 08 July 2002 09:56, Joseph Wenninger wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm trying among other things to add a new feature to the kate commandline
> and to the interfaces.
> That feature is more or less a bugfix for a problem, which will arise soon
> and means again an incompatible plugin interface for the kate application.
> Which is not acceptable after 3.1 till 4.0. We should try to stay BC to
> "older" plugins after the 3.1 release.
>
>
> kate --plugin someplug  filename
>
> This would allow us to easily startup kate and hand the initialisation over
> to a plugin. The file "filename" is some config script, which could contain
> data depending on the plugin it is handled by:
>
> a complete project file (document list + plugins + view positions ...)
>
> a file list only (that should be the first prove of concept)
> ......

This sounds like an idear, I have been considering how to do that as well.

If you saw the mail from Charles Samuels yesterday, you'll know that working 
with file lists bubbles up the wish list:)

I'll CC my reply to a response I got from Charles to the list.

One plugin that I have allmost done is the file templates one, which could 
benefit, with a commandline like
kate --plugin FileTemplates <template name>
for example, though that would take a bit of work on in first.

maybe a plugin's .desktop file could just provide a funciton name to call with 
the file name as arg in this situation? The plugin would be free to do 
whatever it wanted with it then, and you could get some cool actions, like 
"New HTML file (Kate)" or "New KDE application (Kate)" on your desktop...

Some time ago cullmann suggested a simple use of file lists, which I think we 
should also consider.

There will be a lot of things to solve with the kate session management 
though. How do we know if the full file list should be saved on shutdown, and 
if it should be read on startup. And if someone wants multiple instances, the 
sessions should be handled seperately. Maybe the workspace idear is worth 
considering.

> I think this is the easiest to configure (.desktop) and possibly most
> powerfull aproach

In my never finished project system, I wanted to use a KConfig object to store 
project properties, for exactly those reasons. A file list may be just a 
group in a config object, and any project manager can add what ever else it 
wants to, as well as we could provide a mechanism for managing plugin 
configuration.

When I was designing that plugin (I never got to really implement very much of 
it, though I do have some cool stuff lying around), my idear was that a 
"project" would be nothing else but a list of locations (files, directories) 
in it's most simple incarnation.

The plan was to make a pluggable system, in which a plugin could provide tools 
and actions related to a specific task (programming/maintaining an 
application, running/designing a web site etc). Each plugin could provide 
pages for a wizzard, optionally using standard tools to achieve common tasks 
like compiling, debugging, cvs etc.

And I created some tools for a completely user-defined project type, in which 
the actions could be any shell command, using standard ui windows, and stored 
in the project file.

The only thing I did do was a test project, a filterable output view and a 
mechanism to define actions for running shell commands with a few strings 
(they can save them selves to a config oject:).

I still have a html page about it at http://www.alweb.dk/kateproject.html 
iirc.

Apart from me getting caught up with other stuff meanwhile, I still believe 
that my considerations are valid and the system I started to design sane and 
sound.

-anders
(who is looking for more small things to fix, pushing the printing code in 
fromt of him :-\\ )
(and who got reminded from this discussion that he never got to ask the RC 
dude if he know kate has it's own feature plan :-)
(which latter he /still/ didn't update :-( )