Guidance porting to KDE 4
 

Hi KDE and KUbuntu Developers,

My name is Nicolas Ternisien, and I'm the kdeadmin coordinator. I am
planning to port most of Guidance application to KDE 4, in order (if
it does not take too much time) to include it into the kdeadmin module
for KDE 4.3 release.

I'm planning to import the 0.8 release of Guidance to the following
folder, probably with the name guidance-kde4 :

http://websvn.kde.org/branches/guidance/

This porting will have fulfill the following tasks :

- Port to the CMake build system (the
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeadmin/system-config-printer-kde/
project of Jonathan Riddell will be a good startup point)
- Port main applications to KDE 4 (in my point of view, in the
following priority order : userconfig, serviceconfig, mountconfig,
displayconfig and wineconfig)
- Succeed to integrate those applications as KDE 4 KCModule, to
include them into systemsettings (as it was in KDE 3)

I will try to make my best to succeed those tasks, but it will be a
pleasure to receive help from anybody. I've discussed with Simon
Edwards, which told me that the KUbuntu team already ported the
userconfig app to KDE 4, so if you see no problem in this, the
Launchpad bzr branch will be merged into the KDE SVN guidance porting
folder.

This achievement will have the advantage to provide an easy
architecture for people interested in creating new Admin KCModule,
using the really good Python language, and replace old and sometimes
ugly applications from the KDE Admin module (more particularly KSysV
and KUser). Of course, this replacing will be done only when the
Guidance equivalent apps will have the potentially missing features
those old applications had.

I hope this project is being interesting you, and as you see, this
project is starting early to have a chance to vastly improve kdeadmin
module for KDE 4.3

The KDE 4.3 schedule has been updated about this project :
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.3_Feature_Plan#kdeadmin

Cheers.

Nicolas Ternisien

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Guidance porting to KDE 4
 

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 12:24 PM, Nicolas Ternisien
<nicolas.ternisien@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi KDE and KUbuntu Developers,
>
> My name is Nicolas Ternisien, and I'm the kdeadmin coordinator. I am
> planning to port most of Guidance application to KDE 4, in order (if
> it does not take too much time) to include it into the kdeadmin module
> for KDE 4.3 release.
>
> I'm planning to import the 0.8 release of Guidance to the following
> folder, probably with the name guidance-kde4 :
>
> http://websvn.kde.org/branches/guidance/
>
> This porting will have fulfill the following tasks :
>
> - Port to the CMake build system (the
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeadmin/system-config-printer-kde/
> project of Jonathan Riddell will be a good startup point)
> - Port main applications to KDE 4 (in my point of view, in the
> following priority order : userconfig, serviceconfig, mountconfig,
> displayconfig and wineconfig)
> - Succeed to integrate those applications as KDE 4 KCModule, to
> include them into systemsettings (as it was in KDE 3)
>
> I will try to make my best to succeed those tasks, but it will be a
> pleasure to receive help from anybody. I've discussed with Simon
> Edwards, which told me that the KUbuntu team already ported the
> userconfig app to KDE 4, so if you see no problem in this, the
> Launchpad bzr branch will be merged into the KDE SVN guidance porting
> folder.
>
> This achievement will have the advantage to provide an easy
> architecture for people interested in creating new Admin KCModule,
> using the really good Python language, and replace old and sometimes
> ugly applications from the KDE Admin module (more particularly KSysV
> and KUser). Of course, this replacing will be done only when the
> Guidance equivalent apps will have the potentially missing features
> those old applications had.
>
> I hope this project is being interesting you, and as you see, this
> project is starting early to have a chance to vastly improve kdeadmin
> module for KDE 4.3
>
> The KDE 4.3 schedule has been updated about this project :
> http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.3_Feature_Plan#kdeadmin
>
> Cheers.
>
> Nicolas Ternisien
>

What is the target audience for the kdeadmin module? Is it for
(casual) system administrators, or is it supposed to provide easy
tools for users?

To summarize the below: guidance is a nice set of tools, but I think
it'll be a little more than just a port of it to KDE4 to get well
integrated, user friendly configuration tools for KDE.

A straight port of guidance would have filled a hole for Kubuntu 8.10,
but I'm not sure if it's right for KDE. I'm not sure about
serviceconfig and mountconfig -- those are probably good mostly as
they are but I haven't really looked at them other than to run into lp
bug 87829 [1], which blocks one of the most likely uses of mountconfig
for new users.

userconfig is a nice tool, but it seems to me a little too much like a
graphical editor for /etc/group and /etc/passwd. Which is great if
the target audience is system administrators, but it doesn't seem all
that friendly for beginners. When I started working on porting
userconfig (now I think txwikinger (Ralph Janke) is working on it)
Riddell pointed me to this a new user configuration tool the fedora
people are working on [2] for Gnome. The interface is kind of a copy
of Mac OS X, but I think some of the ideas are nice -- integrating
some of the "About Me" and login manager settings in the tool. It
didn't seem quite feasible to do all that for a Kubuntu tool, since it
may involve messing with other KCMs, but maybe some of the ideas can
be used if this is taken up by upstream? Their tool is also supposed
to deal well with different configurations such as LDAP, which I don't
think userconfig handles, so it potentially doesn't really cover the
needs of a sysadmins either. The Fedora tool is supposed to have a
backend, so I think it's worth looking into and sharing some of that.
I haven't looked at it since then though, so I don't know if it's
gotten anywhere.
The current bzr branch(es) of guidance/userconfig are here btw:
https://code.launchpad.net/guidance

displayconfig is now replaced by kcmrandr, hopefully. (Is that using
this Kephal library?) The latter still needs work, and taking some of
the interface from displayconfig might be a good idea, but the backend
of displayconfig is outdated now, as ScottK can attest to after trying
to fix it up for Hardy. However, there are also some features in
displayconfig other than resolution setting and such that are
currently not covered in KDE modules AFAIK, like gamma settings.
displayconfig also had display power settings, which system settings
already has, but is that taken care of by powerdevil now (in 4.2)?

Porting of wineconfig is probably not the way to go at this point.
There are some people working on wine integration for KDE (or at least
said they were planning to). Scott Ritchie has had plans up for wine
integration for a while [3][4], mostly targeted toward Gnome, but
progress has been slow. He told me recently that they are working on
a DBus interface to wine, so better tools can be made. Once that's
ready, it'll be worth looking into whether to have a comprehensive
tool like wineconfig, which would need a new backend, or something
simpler like in his plan. The one thing I'd like to port is the color
scheme importing and make a script for it, so if somebody could point
me to some documentation of how color settings are stored in KDE4, if
that's changed from KDE3, that'd be great.

Anyway, I think it's great that people are taking this on and I hope
it'll result in some really nice configuration tools for KDE 4.3.

~ Yuriy Kozlov

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kde-guidance/+bug/87829
[2] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2008-May/msg00006.html
[3] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/ScottRitchie
[4] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/BetterIntegratedWineSpec

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Guidance porting to KDE 4
 

Hi and thanks for your answers,

The main goal of porting Guidance to KDE 4 is not to blindly integrate
all of its sub applications to the KDE Admin. The goal is to port the
applications that do not already cover something that the KDE main
tree don't do actually.

Here is my opinion on each sub applications :

displayconfig :
You are right, the displayconfig for example don't need to be ported,
as another project already do this in KDE.

userconfig :
KUser and userconfig both look like a graphical editor for /etc/group
and /etc/passwd. In my opinion, userconfig misses only 2/3 features
that KUser has before being able to replace it. In my opinion,
userconfig could only be the start of an application that could be
improved, and it will be integrated only if KDE core developers think
it is sufficently powerful and have an interest. If the Fedora tool
has a backend and that's this backend is providen to any distribution,
then userconfig will be improved to use it. As I said previously, it's
only a start (or restart in this case, as KUser exists).

serviceconfig :
Serviceconfig has pratically the same history than userconfig, but the
main difference is that KSysV is really old and not really good, so
its replacing will be easier and earlier.

mountconfig :
If mountconfig has issues, they will need to be fixed before
integrating it to KDE Admin. I've maybe not specifying that each sub
applications will have to follow the KDE application process
(http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/SVN_Guidelines)

wineconfig :
If a D-Bus interface has been started in the Wine project, maybe we
could wait its release to see if the porting is necessary, or if it
could be better to rewrite it from scratch.

guidance-power-manager :
It seems that power-devil will be the next application that will take
care about battery management, so, the Guidance one is not
particularly needed.

To conclude, there are 3 applications of the Guidance project that
could be used, and that could be ported to KDE 4 (userconfig port is
already started). Those applications will have to follow the KDE
application integration policy one by one, to be sure there are enough
mature to be part of KDE.

The guidance-kde4 branch will contain only those 3 applications, to
reflect what we said here.

Do you agree with this ?

Nicolas Ternisien

On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 8:10 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@kitterman.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:35:27 -0500 "Yuriy Kozlov"
> <yuriy-kozlov@kubuntu.org> wrote:
> ...
>>displayconfig is now replaced by kcmrandr, hopefully. (Is that using
>>this Kephal library?) The latter still needs work, and taking some of
>>the interface from displayconfig might be a good idea, but the backend
>>of displayconfig is outdated now, as ScottK can attest to after trying
>>to fix it up for Hardy. However, there are also some features in
>>displayconfig other than resolution setting and such that are
>>currently not covered in KDE modules AFAIK, like gamma settings.
>>displayconfig also had display power settings, which system settings
>>already has, but is that taken care of by powerdevil now (in 4.2)?
>>
>
> Redoing the displayconfig back end to work with xrandr and modern
> xorg.conf'less systems is a critical piece. I don't see significant value
> in a KDE4 port of displayconfig.
>
> From what I've been reading, it sounds like many of the currently missing
> bits in the kcmrandr tool have been added in 4.2.
>
> Guidance power manager still works pretty well (that's been ported
> already). It could stand some re-enginnering on the back end as I don't
> think it's entirely in synch with modern hal/dbus magic.
>
> AFAIK, the Kubuntu plan for 9.04 is to switch to powerdevil.
>
> Scott K
>

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Guidance porting to KDE 4
 

For information, the branch has been started here :

http://websvn.kde.org/branches/guidance/guidance-kde4/

Nicolas

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Nicolas Ternisien
<nicolas.ternisien@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi and thanks for your answers,
>
> The main goal of porting Guidance to KDE 4 is not to blindly integrate
> all of its sub applications to the KDE Admin. The goal is to port the
> applications that do not already cover something that the KDE main
> tree don't do actually.
>
> Here is my opinion on each sub applications :
>
> displayconfig :
> You are right, the displayconfig for example don't need to be ported,
> as another project already do this in KDE.
>
> userconfig :
> KUser and userconfig both look like a graphical editor for /etc/group
> and /etc/passwd. In my opinion, userconfig misses only 2/3 features
> that KUser has before being able to replace it. In my opinion,
> userconfig could only be the start of an application that could be
> improved, and it will be integrated only if KDE core developers think
> it is sufficently powerful and have an interest. If the Fedora tool
> has a backend and that's this backend is providen to any distribution,
> then userconfig will be improved to use it. As I said previously, it's
> only a start (or restart in this case, as KUser exists).
>
> serviceconfig :
> Serviceconfig has pratically the same history than userconfig, but the
> main difference is that KSysV is really old and not really good, so
> its replacing will be easier and earlier.
>
> mountconfig :
> If mountconfig has issues, they will need to be fixed before
> integrating it to KDE Admin. I've maybe not specifying that each sub
> applications will have to follow the KDE application process
> (http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/SVN_Guidelines)
>
> wineconfig :
> If a D-Bus interface has been started in the Wine project, maybe we
> could wait its release to see if the porting is necessary, or if it
> could be better to rewrite it from scratch.
>
> guidance-power-manager :
> It seems that power-devil will be the next application that will take
> care about battery management, so, the Guidance one is not
> particularly needed.
>
> To conclude, there are 3 applications of the Guidance project that
> could be used, and that could be ported to KDE 4 (userconfig port is
> already started). Those applications will have to follow the KDE
> application integration policy one by one, to be sure there are enough
> mature to be part of KDE.
>
> The guidance-kde4 branch will contain only those 3 applications, to
> reflect what we said here.
>
> Do you agree with this ?
>
> Nicolas Ternisien
>
> On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 8:10 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@kitterman.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:35:27 -0500 "Yuriy Kozlov"
>> <yuriy-kozlov@kubuntu.org> wrote:
>> ...
>>>displayconfig is now replaced by kcmrandr, hopefully. (Is that using
>>>this Kephal library?) The latter still needs work, and taking some of
>>>the interface from displayconfig might be a good idea, but the backend
>>>of displayconfig is outdated now, as ScottK can attest to after trying
>>>to fix it up for Hardy. However, there are also some features in
>>>displayconfig other than resolution setting and such that are
>>>currently not covered in KDE modules AFAIK, like gamma settings.
>>>displayconfig also had display power settings, which system settings
>>>already has, but is that taken care of by powerdevil now (in 4.2)?
>>>
>>
>> Redoing the displayconfig back end to work with xrandr and modern
>> xorg.conf'less systems is a critical piece. I don't see significant value
>> in a KDE4 port of displayconfig.
>>
>> From what I've been reading, it sounds like many of the currently missing
>> bits in the kcmrandr tool have been added in 4.2.
>>
>> Guidance power manager still works pretty well (that's been ported
>> already). It could stand some re-enginnering on the back end as I don't
>> think it's entirely in synch with modern hal/dbus magic.
>>
>> AFAIK, the Kubuntu plan for 9.04 is to switch to powerdevil.
>>
>> Scott K
>>
>

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