[Portland] Summarize current plan?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sun, Mar 12, 2006 at 02:50:42PM -0800, Dan Kegel wrote:
> On 3/12/06, Bryce Harrington <bryce at osdl.org> wrote:
> > > I guess I'm surprised that dapi can't be like that;
> > > a very basic library that I can statically link in
> > > and magically gain the ability to make a menu.
> > > I could accept that I might have to add some complexity
> > > (like bundle a daemon) if I wanted to get fancy,
> > > but why can't I just have an easy way to make my
> > > menu appear?
> >
> > Yep, although menus are probably not the best thing to consider here,
> > since they do have a standardized spec to them.  In fact, I think there
> > was a point made that dapi probably shouldn't do menu stuff for just
> > this reason.
> 
> GAAAAAAH.  OK, can all the DAPI people go to one side of
> the room?  Great.   You guys knock yourselves out; presumably
> your goal is to unify many aspects of the KDE and Gnome APIs.
> Now, everybody else, lets put together a second package that
> only tries to unify a few small aspects of the KDE and Gnome
> environments, the ones that can be done *without* a daemon,
> e.g. menu item creation, email client invocation, and the like.
> By design, it will be 5% the size of DAPI, and will be more suitable
> for bundling with ISV's apps (so it can be used before it's part of LSB).
> I'm not really knocking DAPI -- it's just that we need something
> ultrasimple, too.

Fwiw, if this can be done, I'd be easily swayed.  The thing I like most
about dapi (and the other prototypes) is that it exists as working
code.  But simpler is better, so I'd love to test out a non-daemon
approach if someone codes one up.

Bryce