[Portland] Project Portland, RuDI and the Generic desktop adapter

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 07 December 2005 05:00, nf2 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> May i join in your discussion? :-)
>
> I have already written a poposal and a prototype for a cross desktop
> interface in between applications and desktops, called "The Generic
> Desktop Adapter". It seems very close to what "RuDI" wants to achieve,
> but using a traditional in-process library approach with dlopen().
>
> http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/dadapt/
>
> Perhaps you can give me some feedback on my proposal and tell me if it
> makes sense to continue working in that direction.
>
> What do you think?

there is an open question on your page asking how to tell when you are in 
which desktop... for KDE, we set an environment variable:

	KDE_FULL_SESSION=true

and kwin sets an XAtom called KWIN_RUNNING, which is useful for having a 
pretty good chance at guessing that you are in KDE even when the app is 
launched remotely.

that said, your approach does require AFAICS unifying the event loops. which 
cuts out any and all apps that aren't written to those toolkits that adopt 
that event loop. this means for most apps that the authors will have to port 
to a newer version of their toolkit before taking advantage of such an 
approach which in turn often has a fairly significant cost for them.

the IPC approach also works better with apps being run remotely on a different 
machine than the desktop is, but that's perhaps a corner case these days.

as for ABI stability, saying that it isn't a problem because we already link 
to .so's is like saying that complaining about the flu is silly because 
you've had flus in the past. the idea is to avoid past problems, not find 
creative new ways to repeat them. ISVs are highly allergic to ABI stability 
issues, which is why many use as FEW libs as possible, statically link when 
possible and often even ship their own versions of the .so/dll when that 
fails.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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