[Portland] What exactly does DAPI cover?

[Kevin Krammer]

On Friday 07 April 2006 21:48, Karol Pietrzak wrote:
> On Thursday 06 April 2006 07:51, Martin Olsson wrote:

> > Won't ISVs still have to choose either KDE/QT or Gnome/GTK for
> > development? Or will DAPI later wrap _all_ GUI widgets somehow so that an
> > application can be compiled into both "native KDE" and "native Gnome" or,
> > like, ehm.. how does this DAPI thing work?
>
> I'm not a Portland developer, a developer nonetheless, and you're right:
> ISVs still have to pick KDE/QT or Gnome/GTK.

No, they won't
They can just use Qt, GTK, wxWidgets, FLTK, FOX Toolkit, Motif, pure-xlib or 
even code their own X11 client implementation.

DAPI allows them to use service of the desktop frameworks, e.g GNOME, KDE, 
while keeping their dependencies out of their own build requirements.

A lot of desktop services are not GUI related: launching applications, MIME 
type information retrieval, global user settings, addressbook querying, stuff 
that could even be interesting to commandline applications.

> There is no wrapper around Qt 
> and GTK, nor are there current plans for once as far as I know.  With
> hundreds of widgets provided by each library, it would be quite a task
> indeed.

wxWidgets is such a wrapper toolkit if I am not mistaken.
However, unless they wrap desktop APIs as well, a wxWidgets application still 
has to use something like DAPI to access desktop framework related services.

> As for your comment that typically an application does more than just open
> a URL, etc.  I think another, just as big issue, is the inconsistency
> between Linux distributions.  One may use CUPS as the printing subsystem,
> another may use LPRng.  Hell, another distribution might use both.  Some
> distributions may use /usr/man as the man page directory, others
> /usr/share/man.  Most Linux distributions use the init scripts for startup,
> but "standardizing" on init scripts prohibits innovations such as launchd
> on Linux.

AFAIK this is more the scope of LSB and FHS respectively.

> In other words, there needs to be a wrapper for everything:
> - open a URL
> - get me all available printers
> - what's the man page directory?
> - is this window manager XDG compliant?
> - install this .desktop file for use for all WMs on this system
>
> I actually started a little work on this not too long ago at
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/ldw.  Once I have more time I hope to
> return to it.  I plan on using the DAPI, and extending it, so to speak. 
> Anyone interested in my "quest"?

The "Docs" section seems to be empty. Any link to some kind of overview?

> The DAPI developers will have better DAPI-specific answers for you, though.

Twice.

I am already getting good in it :)

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at>
Qt/KDE Developer, Debian User
Moderator: www.mrunix.de (German), www.qtcentre.org
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