[Portland] Thoughts on the integration tasks

[Alex Graveley]

Hey Billy,

The simple fact is that the list on PortlandIntegrationTasks was 
proposed by ISVs (SWT people included).

So regardless of whether the solution to each is a matter of 1) clearer 
documentation, or 2) better use of existing solutions, or 3) abstracting 
a platform's underlying mechanisms, I still consider them to be definite 
problems that need to be solved.

-Alex

Billy Biggs wrote:
>   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
> 
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