In bazaar style (Ha, I actually found a link with the picture I want to share with all of you), here’s
our wishlist for guidance in Kubuntu Gutsy:
-
Powermanager needs to be ported to Qt4, there is little KDE-specific in there, so it’s one of
the obvious candidates to switch early. In the process, the ugly polling should be changed to
an event-based approach, something which is not possible with PyQt3 since there’s a clash in
the mainloops of Qt3 and DBus. -
Serviceconfig needs some porting to upstart. It’s mostly trivial though. Instead of using
symlinking in /etc/rc.X/ we should switch to update-rc.d. Upstart also makes some things much
easier, for example finding out if a service is running or not.# status $SERVICE # start $SERVICE # stop $SERVICE
Those commands should be used by serviceconfig. Also, descriptions can be extracted from the services in /etc/event.d/, ultimately, those can be even localised. All in all, upstart seems to be a very nice step forward compared to the rather awkward init system.
- Displayconfig needs additions. XRandR 1.2 will offer quite a lot of additional runtime-configuration, wrapping that kind of stuff from C to be able to use it in displayconfig (or the displayconfig-gtk backend) is necessary. Although only some drivers will support it in Gutsy, it seems like a good idea to have this kind of stuff. It could possibly easily be done using CTypes.
- Userconfig should get some more meaningful default groups. We could make the interface a bit simpler by adding a “[ ] May become admin” button and move the group membership to an ‘advanced’ tab.
If you want to get your hands dirty on some python code, those are the things on our agenda. I myself will probably not have time to implement most of those, so drop me a note if you’d like to work on some of them.Guidance can be found in KDE’s Subversion repository, in svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/utils/guidance.