Minutes of the Design Hangout: 2014-12-10

[Jan-Marek Glogowski]

Am 11.12.2014 um 09:25 schrieb Jan Holesovsky:
> * KDE5 vclplug
>  
>     + working on it
>     + when is the next release? (Jonathan)
>          + 4.5 in 6 months

So somebody started a real KDE5 backend? From scratch or based on KDE4?
Because the KDE4 backhand has some limits. Most of the stuff in the
following list is implemented in the Gtk+ backend.

- No modal native dialogs
  LO VCL KDE4 doesn't use QWidgets, so AFAIK there is no way to
implement the modal for the file picker . Gtk+ wraps the LO widgets in
GtkWidgets, so modal native dialogs work.

- No native widgets
  LO VCL KDE4 basically just uses some painting methods to render stuff.
But we miss quite some stuff and others - like Oxygen menus can't really
be used. But the KDE4 plugin can reimplement the SalMenu, like Gtk does
to get the "real" background from the engine.

- Slow
  All drawing operations are performed on a single image and copied to
X. This image is always destroyed and there is basically no caching.
Gtk+ keeps a caching widget per type around.

- Use KIO
  Currently LO sets "X-KDE-Protocols=file,http,ftp,webdav". Even smb was
included for some time. But actually this depends on the native load /
save dialog settings, and even the VCL backend, because the KDE4 file
picker / VCL backend doesn't support neither smb nor webdav without KIO.
See

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2014-September/063621.html
  http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2014-October/063876.html

AFAIK there are still also Qt5 patches missing - same stuff that is was
fixed for Qt4, but also isn't in (yet).

ATB

Jan-Marek