Re: RFC before sending patches for a few FIXMEs

[Clement Moyroud <clement moyroud net>]

On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 05:57, Nat Friedman wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 03:46, Clement Moyroud wrote:
> 
> > 1/ Where should Dashbord configuration go ? GConf might be the good
> > solution, being the Gnome standard. I have used this layout :
> 
> For the most part, dashboard should have as little configuration as
> possible.  Any necessary parameters (like the path to the user's browser
> directory) should be read from the relevant places in the system.
> 
> Some configuration will be necessary, and I think using GConf makes
> perfect sense.  For all GConf keys we add, though, we need to add
> schemas with descriptions of what they configure.
> 

The patch for Google includes the schemas (engine/dashboard.schemas) for
both Google and Bugzilla, as well as config.in and engine/Makefile.am
additions to have them installed

> The big dashboard configuration problem is backend selection.  I think
> some of this will be automatic -- figuring out which browser you use by
> default, for example -- and some will be user-configurable.  Relevance
> filtering may end up changing the semantics of this.
> 
> > 2/ the MozillaBookmarksBackend author would like to use XPath for the
> > parsing of the html file. To my (limited !) knowledge, that is not
> > possible. The bookmarks.html file is not well-formed XML (not being
> > XHTML compliant). One could write a SGML parser, but I'm not sure it'll
> > be good performance-wise compared to the regexp used actually.
> 
> I don't know whether it's possible or not, since I don't know the format
> of the Mozilla bookmarks.  Since we have a working regexp now, I don't
> see a reason to change it.

I have corrected the regex (it didn't work, see Tim Mellor's patch) and
added code to retrieve and cache the favicons.

> > - mozilla-backend-patch.diff : adds 2 gconf keys for the choice of the
> > mozilla flavour and the profile name
> 
> I think we need to autodetect the user's browser and default profile.

Done ! This removes the gconf keys, since everything should be
autodetected.
I have also added code to use a proxy if it is defined and set to 'on'
in gconf. This could be a dashboard-wide piece of code, avoiding gconf
interaction as much as possible.
As for autodetection, I think we could have a better behaviour than :
1/ load the browser backend
2/ see if it is the default browser and unload if necessary
3/ repeat from step 1

Maybe we could use a backend loader that checks the default browser and
loads only the relevant one, *if* we only want to load a single backend.

> 
> Thanks for your patches!  Nice stuff!
> 

You're welcome ! It's such a neat piece of work, it makes me want to
contribute.


Clement (a.k.a. Mool on IRC)