Re: Dashboard Design Questions and Other Stuff

[Andrew Ruthven <andrew etc gen nz>]

On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 00:28 -0400, Kevin Kubasik wrote:
> Hey, I was just hacking around with dashboard again tonight and I was
> looking into more frontends and I just started to realize how much
> duplicate information were gonna have flying around so I wanted to bring
> up a few points.

Its great to see someone picking it up again.  Good stuff.

> My first point is, that while the window stuff is really cool. (I love
> that dashboard can be workspace aware etc) but we need to have a better
> fallback, since at the moment, if a cluepacket goes in with a bad
> window, the UI just crashes. Duh, most of dashboard is proof of concept
> at the point and its really just being revived now, but still that makes
> stirring up interest in 3rd parties very difficult, and makes it hard to
> get that 'cool, and almost useful factor working for us.

Surely this is part of making Dashboard more robust and able to take
whatever crap is thrown at it and "do the right thing".

Perhaps it is time to start thinking about writing some test framework
as well.  :(

> My other question is how we want to handle frontends when the program
> offers no realistic interface for doing this? Will we have another
> daemon such as beagle to crawl/watch files? On the same note, writing a
> gaim plugin has been rough, as getting that compliant xml out of C is a
> little beyond me. But watching dbus for the gaim events and using that
> is really easy, do we want to do that? If so, how exactly do I proceed
> in making this fit into the current dashboard framework.

Why do we need another daemon for crawling/watching files?  I thought
that was the intention of Beagle.  Beagle is intended to index all the
various bits and pieces and Dashboard queries it.  Dashboard could then
generate more cluepackets based on the results from Beagle.

Hopefully Dashboard will be able to make use of the same viewers (ie,
Gaim logs) as Beagle provides.

Can you not use the old Gaim plugin that used to exist?  Have things
moved on to much since then?  (I wouldn't be surprised if that is the
case!)  And if there are issues with generating the XML from C, then it
is something we should be providing in a library.  This would
(hopefully) ease the acceptance by third parties.

> I realize this is pretty much directed at fredrik, but I figured since
> the mailing list is still called dashboard-hackers I could get away with
> it. ;)

Beagle can't hide his origins!

Cheers!

-- 
Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand
At home: andrew etc gen nz       |  This space intentionally
                                 |        left blank.