From: John P . Looney (valen at domain tuatha.org)
Date: Wed 08 Sep 1999 - 10:49:40 IST
On Wed, Sep 08, 1999 at 10:04:55AM +0100, Shane Dempsey mentioned:
> On the subject of kde / gnome interoperability , more is needed.
There is sufficent interoperability - they can talk to each others window
managers currently. However, they are different projects. They work
completely and utterly differently. You can't throw out the GNOME or KDE
DOM/CORBA model, and tell them to start again. It's also quite likely that
in the distant future that the KDE people would use the GNOME bonobo
component system. That would rock. Then, your K-mozilla could use the same
mozilla Bonobo component as Gmozilla etc.
> The libs are too consumptive on resources if loaded together.
> Maybe what is needed is a common CORBA based widget lib which is accepted by
> the major distros and which allows the standard interface to be be passed
> GUI events through whatever the GUI developers deem is an acceptable GUI
> under X.
Surely you are not advocating the creation of a third set of widget
libraries ? It should be pointed out that GNOME's CORBA stuff has
**nothing** to do with the GUI libraries. You can write GNOME apps that
don't have a GUI interface, just a corba/text one.
> If an app looks for an unavailable lib then the machine's default should
> suffice. A tall order but not impossible.
Very tall. Widget sets aren't interchangable. At all. Although GTK has a
"gtk-engine" idea, whereby you can re-write what the widget does and looks
like (even look like KDE, if you wanted), the supporting code, the way the
widgets are created, mapped and positioned are different in every widget
set.
> Sorry to rant but so many linux users can't distinguish between its
> wonderful features and its more glaring problems. A better help system would
> be nice aswell. Again this could be standardised.
I think what's there is fine. All of GNOME's stuff is in Docbook. The
GNOME help widget will read docbook, html, man pages and info pages, with
no user intervention. It would be nice if everyone wrote in the same
format, but that's as likely as everyone turning around tomorrow and saying
"For all my coding, I'm going to use GTK, under Unix, BeOS and Win32". It's
possible, but it's not going to happen...
> It may be nuts but I believe that the only way that the rest of the software
> industry will survive the Microsoft onslaught is to put as much money and
> developers behind developing a standard framework
> for linux gui's, device support, package management ( rpm is OK , just
> improve the UI ) , office software etc that is as interoperable with
> Microsoft as makes sense while retaining the stability that microsoft
> has never provided.
The UI for RPM is fine. Have you used GNOrpm ? It'll connect to RPMfind
tell you want packages you could upgrade, if you wanted to, etc. It rocks.
If Linux gets a "standard framework" ? As in, if everyone used the same
Widget sets, desktop environment, version of the compiler ? Can't see that
happening. There's always someone with a new widget set, window manager,
compiler, kernel patch. As long as I can run an application on my machine,
after downloading any libraries it says it needs, I'm happy.
If no new widget sets ever evolved, we would be still stuck with Athena.
If no new desktops ever appeared, we would be using twm. EGCS gave GCC a
kick in the arse that it badly needed. It's called evolution. If a system
has completely uniform components, it'll die. Amiga. NeXT. AtariST.
Unix has only thrived through diversity. OK, so Windows is a non-diverse
environment that has surived on marketing and monopoly alone, but that's
just an exception. There may come a day where GNOME and KDE are used by
'oldtimers', while everyone uses the Enlightenment DE, but I don't fear it.
I fear a single, tight standard, as much as complete chaos.
Kate
-- Microsoft. The best reason in the world to drink beer.
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