[PyKDE] KDE Panel Applets in Python

[Jim Bublitz]

I took a look tonight at what's really involved with panel applets,
and here's the best I can do:

1. It's not possible to write panel applets directly (or
exclusively) in Python because they need to be .so files.

2. There doesn't appear to be a way to write a general panel applet
loader that you could install to load an arbitrary Python applet.
That means I would have to provide some method (probably completely
automated) to allow users to create the necessary C++ files/.so
lib. Every applet needs it's own .so file because there is no way
(except for the lib name) to tell what applet kicker is trying to
load. (I may be wrong on this, but I can't find any way to do it).

3. To avoid using autoconf/automake, I'd need to see if I can fake
the .la lib that libtool creates and kicker looks for when loading
an applet. The .la file is only text, but I'm not sure if the libs
qmake generates are compatible with the libtool calls kicker uses
(lt_open, etc.). Seems like it should work.

4. There's still the concern that PyQt/PyKDE are too large to use
to write applets in the first place. Minimum applet size with PyKDE
would be in the vicinity of 10MB.

I can probably automate the C++ part with some kind of "wizard" and
much of this relates to some stuff I want to look at anyway, so I'm
not opposed to putting something together. What I'd like to know is
if the above looks too unappealing to people, or if there are at
least a few people interested in using something like this. If I
don't get a least a few positive responses it probably won't happen.


Jim