Saturday, January 31, 2009

Anyone want any hot new stuff?

Hi all,

In talking with Roger (DaSkreech) lately, we've been wondering what apps in KDE haven't been using KNewStuff to distribute data for their applications. KNewStuff is very well used in kde-edu apps, and in many of the kdegames for distributing game themes, levels, etc. It's also very well used in the desktop to distribute wallpapers, colorschemes, plasma themes, etc. I'd like to see it used more in apps like KRecipe, to get more recipe's, in any app that has support for scripting to distribute scripts, and so forth.

I am aware there are some missing features in KNewStuff, and woild like to know what developers have found when they've tried to use it. Any missing features that hindered it's use, or just lack of know-how of how to use it and set it up?

Some things I've been considering lately have been setting up a ghns provider at home to provide access to family pictures in wallpaper size, and making a windows port of khotnewstuff4 those family members stuck on windows could use to fetch the images. A bit over the top, but definitely possible. Many more ideas for ghns, and ODC (Open Desktop Collaboration) can be found in Frank's Keynote from last years akademy, a great presentation full of ideas for bringing our technology further along.

Anyway, if you have any ideas for how ghns could be used in more apps, or improvements for it, don't hesitate to leave comments here, or e-mail us on the ghns list ghns@lists.freedesktop.org or come join #ghns in irc.

4 comments:

Angel Blue01 said...

More functionality needs to be added. There needs to be a way to remove an installed item! I installed a dozen plasma themes, discovered I don't like them, and want them gone. Likewise, there should be an "update all" button, rather than having to go down the list and clicking update for each one. I would like it if there was a way to alert the user if further action needs to be taken: some icon themes for example require separate installations or are in non-standard containers.

There needs to be an easy way to add sources. If its possible to set up a hotnewstuff server, as you plan to do, then it would be great to easily add custom servers to the list.

Jos Poortvliet said...

besides what Angel already asked for, I think it would be great if rating and commenting would be working.

And a build-in uploader would rock as well.

Jarrad said...

This is probably a more of an internal change, but it would be fantastic if kde[apps|look] could provide deb/rpm repositories. GHNS could then act as a simple frontend to the distro's package management system. This would take care of updates, as well as dependancies and arch limitations (many binaries are implicitely linux-x86 only, for instance). Problems with this approach include ratings and commenting, as well as x many different package managers to integrate with (and not only Linux; with KDE on BSD and Windows there are a few to deal with. Perhaps simply using apt ports to these systems would work? Also, the kde-win installer has rudimentary package management, doesn't it?)

Unknown said...

To answer your question - I would like the desktop effects to use GHNS. The basic effects could be installed, and GHNS could be used to add addtional desktop effects, allow for other developers to publish effects.

However I agree with Angel, GHNS needs some love. In Kubuntu when I open get new plasmoids, it displays 6. The dropdown list for source shows 1 source.