Just the other day a user in IRC complained about a default in KWin. I thought that the default he expected, is the one which is set in KWin sources. So I opened the respective source file and saw my assumption confirmed. But still the user claimed that there is a different default and I believed him. Further investigation showed that the source code of the configuration module had a different default set. It’s probably like that for years but it shows a problem: the config values are written and read at different places and the hard coded default values might diverge.
This reminded me of the great project we had last year to migrate the configuration of the KWin effects to KConfigXT and of the project to transform the configuration modules in KWin to have ui files. The combination of both calls for a new project: let’s migrate KWin core to KConfigXT. Now this isn’t a project which we will be able to do in one go. So I will split it into three parts:
- Create the kcfg file
- Migrate KWin core
- Migrate the configuration modules
Let’s start with the first one: create the kcfg file. Interestingly we already have such a file in the kwin directory – last change: Nov 20th 2007. It might be that some of the options are still encoded correctly, but I rather doubt it and default values are missing anyway. So I suggest to start clean. I would like to split the task into creating the XML part for the different config groups in KWin, so that the tasks are small. Later on we can then put it together to have one complete file. The project is outlined in this wiki page. Just add yourself to a section if you want to work on it 🙂