merging on the weekend

the stop_the_insanity branch in kicker is coming along nicely and should be ready to be folded back into HEAD next weekend. i decided today that the appletproxy won't be used any more, it just causes too many problems. Waldo suggested a really good idea for how to deal with keeping track of which applets cause problems (which is the whole point of kicker using the appletproxy) on irc today. it's quite elegant and will facilitate the removal of two more classes from kicker! the appletproxy will, of course, remain to make developing and debugging individual applets easier.

i'm probably going to remove the use of the taskbarproxy from kicker as well, since that doesn't seem to be used at all, really. boom. another two classes.

in all, i think that kicker's design was pretty decent, just that the code never really got completed. that is to say, the usual post-version-one refactoring didn't get done. eventually we had a big glob of code for an integral part of the desktop that was rather convoluted. who would want to mess with it? with a reasonable amount of effort, we have been able to make kicker's code a lot more straightforward without sacrificing functionality.

there's an interesting discussion going on kde-policy and elsewhere about whether Amazon's web service terms and conditions allow it to be used in a GPL'd application. personally, i think it's fine due to section 7 of the GPL. but i'm not a lawyer, so ... who knows.

i managed to cause a small stir on kde-promo regarding theDot, which has turned out well i think. Waldo, Fab, Navindra and crew are a great bunch of people and i'm really happy theDot is in their hands. they are open to examining the state of things, as opposed to simply guarding the status quo. my hat's off to those folks.

they could always use more content, of course. so if you've got the hankering, don't hesitate to put together some KDE related info and submit it!

oh, and i keep forgetting to note that in an earlier blog where i referenced kstart as being quicker to start KDE apps, i meant to reference kdeinit_wrapper. one of the talkbacks noted this, and they were quite right.