[Kommander-devel] I hate Kommander

[Andras Mantia]

<rant>
 I hate Kommander. I tried to create a small utility to download images 
from my digital camera and I spent several hours on it without success. 
I tried to do the "bash" way, but Kommander imposed lots of problems 
with the issue that Kommander specials are run first, and bash has its 
limitations as well. The biggest problem was that without an 
echo ""
at the end of the button text, the other button did not work correctly.
The code in the first button inserted some items in a list, the second 
gathered the selected items from it. Without the empty echo, you did 
not get back any selected item and nothing was run from the code of the 
second button. Go figure.
Oh, and echo is not working in the dialog initialization code.

I tried with the Kommander way, using @ functions wherever is possible. 
The beginning was promising. The end was a disaster. I could not figure 
out how to set a local variable and how to use it. So I had to use 
globals.
I could not figure out how to test if a string contains a substring or 
not. I get interesting errors in the following code:
@setGlobal(selection, at FilesList.selection)
@debug(@global(selection))
@forEach(i, @global(files))
 
 @if (@contains(@global(selection), @i)!="")
    @debug(@i)
 @endif
@endfor

"Error in widget DownloadButton:
Unknown special: 'endfor'."

whatever. The documentation lacks a lot of things. The function browser 
is promising, but has problems (like saying you need @endif for the 
forEach), starts always from the same widget, and DCOP calls, needing 
lots of clicks here and there. 
The lack of good error reporting, lack of autocompletion and a decent 
editor makes things even worse.
But the thing I most hate is that you cannot really use the Kommander 
specials together with wathever scripting language you want. And this 
defeats the whole idea behind Kommander. Sooner or later you are forced 
to use the Kommander language, which lacks documentation and many 
items. When you mix two languages it is hard to figure out what will 
happen. 
Well, now I give up. I wanted to ease my job of typing two commands in 
the command line, and made my life harder to fight with Kommander.
</rant>

And what to do?
1) improve the editor with autocompletion, context help, descriptions of 
the methods and how you can do things, code examples in the 
documentation.
2) get rid of the madness about @execBegin, @exec, whatever. It is so 
inconsistent, I never know when to use which and sometimes I stand 
there and stare why things do not work
3) make Kommander intelligent to work together with script languages. 
yes it is hard, requires a rethink and rewrite of the tool, but it is 
something that is needed, otherwise we  just invented the N+1-th 
scripting language. 

Sorry, but I'm not in a good mood (for other reasons as well, and 
because of this)

Andras
-- 
Quanta Plus developer - http://quanta.kdewebdev.org
K Desktop Environment - http://www.kde.org
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