Re: Dashboard Compile & Render Fixes

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 14:16 -0800, Matt Jones wrote:
> I fixed up dashboard so that it builds again. Most of the fixes involved
> replacing dashboard's gnome bindings with those from official *-sharp
> packages, updating -sharp packages to -sharp-2.0 packages, and updating
> the beagle api.
> 
> I've tested the beagle backend with the file and email renderers.

These look good, I think they're fine to commit in light of the current
state of things. :)  So, go ahead.

> The path to the beagle UiUtil dll (for some gnome convenience functions)
> is hardcoded to /usr/lib/beagle/UiUtil (as it's not exposed in a pkg
> config file).

It'd be good to add that, if you wanted to whip up a beagle patch for
that.

> This wasn't really intended as a final solution - I'm actually in the
> process of rewriting dashboard to use the beagle-search UI, use beagle
> as a sole backend, and respond via d-bus rather than a tcp port. I might
> have a prototype available somewhere (probably gnomecvs) possibly this
> weekend.

I'm not totally sold on the beagle-search UI for dashboard, but it is
probably a decent first step.  One thing we realized with Dashboard is
that having different layouts and colors did a good job of naturally
segmenting the content and drawing attention to the different parts.

I don't think that using Beagle as the sole backend is a good idea
anymore.  I know I had advocated that in the past and I think the
current state of the Dashboard source represents my move in that
direction, but Beagle doesn't seem like the right place to do things
like Bugzilla or GeoSites queries.

D-BUS is probably a decent idea because it's becoming more common, but
the reason why we did it over a TCP socket is because it doesn't require
any additional libraries.  There's no dependency to add; you simply
#include the C file, pepper a few function calls in your app and you're
magically instrumented for dashboard.  That's not something to be taken
lightly.

> I was curious - what features did people find really useful about
> dashboard / what did they find annoying? Personally, the clue-chaining
> was really cool (i have some ideas on improving this i want to try out),
> which is the main reason I'm working on this.

I found the cluechaining to be the most useful and interesting part to
work on.  Getting "focus" right is also pretty tricky, especially when
you consider that there are different contexts within applications
(current mail you're viewing in Evo, current tab selected in Firefox,
gaim, gedit, etc.)

Joe