screenlets-dev team mailing list archive

[Rico Pfaus <ryx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everybody!

While browsing through the current code of the screenlets there were
many things that came to my mind. This is a rough list of thoughts,
ideas and plans I had while browsing the code. Some things may need
further discussion and refinement, some things seem to be already done
in universal-applets. Natan (or whoever reads this), if you have any
comments, feel free to add them.

- All screenlets should be moved into one separate launchpad project and
be removed from the core. The core should just contain the core library
stuff. The same for the plugins, though we then may need a
plugin-dependancy-system and -check within each screenlet, but that
should be useful anyway (e.g. to display human-readable messages about
missing deps instead of just crashing with python errors). A simple list
with dependancies would be nice here (or do we have such thing
already?).

- Utils.py needs cleanup and a better organization of functions, many
things don't belong in there (e.g. Evolution-specific code,
file-handling stuff, etc.). The utils.py was never intended to become a
general purpose utils module, it is a utils module for
screenlet-specific functions to be used by external (i.e. non-screenlet)
applications. Although we maybe should move all those to the
screenlets-module itself and then really use utils.py as general-purpose
lib. For fs-related functions maybe a sub-module like e.g. "utils.file"
would be an option? 

- Screenlet-class needs to become its own file and the screenlets-module
__init__.py should just hold utility functions (maybe what was
originally placed in the utils module?) ... (seems to be partly done in
U-A)

- The entire code badly needs one consistent coding style and a document
that describes the coding guidelines.

- The plugin API may need some refinement.

- The whole sensors module needs to be re-thought. Maybe it should
instead become a plugin or be moved to a different place. At least it
badly needs refactoring.

- Unfortunately there was a rollback of my option changes in rev82 and
the OptionGroup was stripped due to backward compatibility issues.
Having it done back then would have caused a lot less work compared to
today, but it is still needed.

- Translation of debug messages makes no sense. Gettext strings need a
complete review. Only menu-items and messages that are directly
displayed to the user should be translated.

- The screenlets-manager should become its own launchpad project (also
useful for packaging). It should then contain the tray-icon app (which
should get splitted from the daemon process as noted below). It also
obviously needs a lot of improvement. My original version was a really
quick hack. The code needs to be splitted and reviewed. Maybe even a
whole new app would be an option.

- The screenlets-daemon should not have a tray icon, that's entirely
against the idea of a background service. The tray icon should be a
separate application and come bundled with the screenlets-manager.


That's it for the start :-) ... I don't know how much this collides with
the things that are already done in (or planned for) universal-applets.
If there is anything then please let me know.


best regards

Rico (RYX)