[bt-devel] display windows - what they should inherit?

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

As you have seen the display windows come up as top level windows of
their own. Maybe the problem is that they inherited KMainWindow and now
KXmlGuiWindow. I use KXmlGuiWindow because of this change
in KDE API: "If you need XmlGui functions from KMainWindow you may want
to use KXmlGuiWindow instead of KMainWindow." KXmlGuiWindow should not
be different from KMainWindow in behaviour (though I cannot know for
sure), so the problem may be in the fact that main window is meant to be
main window, not a subwindow.

Even though mainwindow/xmlwindow worked we would still be dependent on
KDE. If we want to move away from it we should use something else.
QWorkspace which now surrounds all text module viewers can use any
widget but there is also another solution in Qt: QMdiArea and
QMdiSubWindow.

Porting to mdiarea and subwindow is not a huge task. Actually I did it
already. But there are some problems. First, there are new bugs. Second,
session recovery has to be changed. Third, we have to move away from
KAction and KActionCollection.

The third problem is the most important. There is much code which
handles the KActions now. I don't know how much of it must be changed -
with bad luck it's all the code which creates and uses the actions AND
configuring and saving the user interface.

So, what should we do?


  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)