Re: [gDesklets] Meta-Tags

[Bjoern Koch <H Humpel gmx de>]

Hi there,

> I mostly agree. Furthermore we should make a list of valid categories. 

Well, categories is a different thing (which should be talked about in a
different thread, too).

> About the license, this should be explicitly clarified in some README or in 
> code, along with copyright information. I wouldn't replace this with a meta-tag, 
> so make it rather optional. I'm not a lawyer but probably this tag wouldn't 
> suffice. And many of the desklets are currently unlicensed, presumably Freeware 
> (free distribution), so this may be another problem.

A "GPL-2" should be enough (IMHO) as this a well known standard, but I
am not a lawyer neither. For thinks like these there should be a LICENSE
text file somewhere with all details.

Anyway, I think all these meta-information should have two main goals:

1. help the website or update desklets or whatever (like the name and
version attribute)
2. provide a basic set of (useful) information about the display file.
Just like the things you can find in any "About"-window.

Especially with 2. I would recommend NOT TO look at it as a developer!
These ionformation are hardly "useful" for a developer, but
"interesting" for a user. Call it a gimmie or whatever, but this "About"
is a very basic Menu item in all (GUI-) software and gDesklets should
have it, too. This is the place where a user would be looking for things
like contact information (eMail, Website etc.), version numbers
(including date) etc.
Providing these (always remember: optional!) information is like no work
at all with a much much bigger benefit.

> Everything that is not mandatory can be easily replaced with something like 
> "unknown", but we should rather encourage people to use the tags in these cases, 
> at least the ones that will be displayed somewhere (preferences, Shell, About 
> Screen ...) and write the examples into Developer's Book.

Any mandatory as well as any given optional information would be
displayed there. If you do not provide an optional information it simply
will not be displayed :).

> The ones that won't be displayed anywhere are IMHO useless, you may easily write 
> it into README file if you want. These are AFAIK all you have written as 
> optional, except for preview/icon which is quite important.

I'd prefer to see this kind of information in the display file rather
than in a README (but still optional in there if you like to). Most
users won't look for (or even now about) such READMEs.

> Anyway, how's the situation now, which of the tags are mandatory and which are 
> optional?

As far as I  know: none are mandatory, all are optional.
And if I am not wrong (don't shoot me if I am): there is no checking of
the meta-tag, so you can simply "invent" any meta-tag attribute you like
to ...

> The theme you mean like Sidecandy etc? Ok, but you should make it so, that more 
> then one theme would be possible to put there. I can imagine one desklet using 
> more themes. BTW, I'm interested how you want to implement themes in 0.4, but 
> maybe let this to discuss on IRC next Sunday :)

"Theme" might not be the adequate name for it. SideCandy is more a
Template. "Real themes" would be nice and we had a discussion about it a
few years ago in the forum. It would be perfect to switch themes "on the
run", but the problem is - if you take a look at all available
"templated" desklets - that their appoaches (in many different ways) are
sometimes very very different. Implementing "real themes" there will be
a lot of work, if it can be done at all (which I personaly do not believe).

> So at the end I would choose mandatory those meta-tags which are important for 
> distinguishing one from another and which won't break much desklets. So 
> basically: Name, Author, Version

You do not need to break the desklets. Like when switching from Sensors
to Controls there just needs to be a period of time in which a warning
(or whatever) should be shown if mandatory meta-tags are missing before
they become "really mandatory" :).
Or (in the meantime) only if there is a dependency meta-tag with gD >=
0.36 the rest becomes mandatory, too.

> Important but optional are IMHO: preview/icon, category, description, license, 
> theme ... in case that they will be used somewhere. Too many information may be 
> useless to bother the user with, on the other hand. And you have less work with 
> implementing it into the core.

Implementing in the core shouldn't be too hard (well, as far as I can
tell as a try'n'error "programmer"). You just need two lists (or arrays
or fields or whatever). One with the mandatory information, one for the
optional information.
Then you would just first check if all mandatory info is given and if
the rest is part of the optional list...


Greetings, Bjoern