Re: Are plasmoids expected to be good citizens

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Re: Are plasmoids expected to be good citizens
by Sebastian Sauer on Monday 24/Mar/2008, @15:57

iirc it does auto-restart. Re win95; the whole OS could crash by any app and not only the desktop by it's plugins. So, probably it's more fair to compare with extensions that crash the WinExplorer (which is afaik responsible for the desktop), with a winamp-plugin that crashes whole of winamp or with a driver that oop's'es whole of linux.

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Re: Are plasmoids expected to be good citizens
by Erunno on Tuesday 25/Mar/2008, @05:50

Technically you are probably right, but from a non-technical user's point of view I presume that a Plasma crash equates to a complete system crash as his main (and probably solely) means of communication with the system are not available any more. If I had to hazzard a guess people who don't know how to launch plasma via krunner or are not familiar with virtual terminals will probably hit the reset button at this point.

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Re: Are plasmoids expected to be good citizens
by Sebastian Sauer on Tuesday 25/Mar/2008, @07:21

> Technically you are probably right

is that different from practical? Sorry, failed to resist :)

> that a Plasma crash equates to a complete system crash as his main (and probably solely) means of communication with the system are not available any more

That's why it auto-restarts. Though before we move again to the beginning of the circle, I may like to point to 2 examples;

1. SuperKaramba
It's a plasmoid that can be run either _in_ process just like most (all?) plasmoids today OR _out_ of process. Right, both is possible and I can imagine that bigger and more complex plasmoids (so, e.g. whole applications rather then a clock or a status-display) can go the same way. Technical (and practical) it just does not make any sense to move e.g. a clock into an own process. See here also the last note at the bottom of http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

2. Trayicons
The trayion plasmoid does display those handy icons which are provided by an app and then embedded into the trayicon plasmoid. So, if a running app crashes it doesn't crash the trayicon-plasmoid and with it plasma.

So, you see. It is technical (and practical *g*) possible already. That the OP does now ask if the crashes he did run into are cause of the "design philosophy of Plasma" is even somewhat funny from the pov of someone who's still running KDE3 on his productive systems like suggested by the release-notes, blogs or even the mainstream-press. The problem is, that an answer like "no, it's cause KDE 4.0.2 isn't as rock stable as e.g. KDE3 kicker+applet are yet, but we are moving rather fast into that direction and once we are there your question will be solved" really does sound so reused, that it's hard to repeat that. Probably an answer like "no, crashes are not a design philosophy but an attitude to life" or "if you don't like that crash we can add a GUI-option to disable it" would offer some more variety of fun?! :)

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