[Portland] Thoughts on the integration tasks

[Billy Biggs]

  Hi!  I work on the SWT widget toolkit, part of the Eclipse project.

  I took a look at the PortlandIntegrationTasks list and it seems to me
that many of the things on this list are already well covered by
existing APIs used by running applications.  For example, GTK+, Qt, and
Motif all have a concept of a default application font, and it is well
understood how to query it.  For MIME system integration, KMimeType and
GNOME-VFS are mostly well established (if they'd stop breaking!).   :)

  Rather than design a new ISV support library, it may be more
productive to identify and address the abundant low-hanging fruit in
desktop interoperability.  For fonts and other system settings, the
XSETTINGS protocol was designed and used by GTK+ with the intention of
promoting interopability, and it was capitalized on by XFCE, but it
seems it was never implemented in KDE/krdb.  I'm sure that the other way
around, having gnome-settings-daemon manage KDE fonts, would be equally
beneficial and likely as simple.

  Even for the file dialog, if the toolkit dialog ever looks out of
place, that seems like a bug in the dialog.  However, I tend to think
that the "file dialog problem" is maybe less important than its status
as canonical-interop-issue would indicate.  When presented with a novel
dialog, users can at least see that it's different and can deal with it,
and furthermore it's not uncommon for applications to customize the file
dialog in some way.  The killer interop issues are the more subtle ones
anyway:

  - WM keybindings aren't standardized, and their union takes over a
    very large range of "nice" keybindings.  This makes it really hard
    to select sane default keybindings in Eclipse that don't conflict
  - keybindings for standard widgets aren't always consistent either
  - input method selection and control, and the general problem of the
    appearance of the right-click menu on any text input widget
  - drag-and-drop interop and standard formats
  - dialog button ordering - I think there is now an XSETTINGS setting,
    can KDE just set this property, and honour it in return?
  - kwin versus metacity behaviour is always fun :)

  -Billy