Qt/GTK Skinning

[Kalle Vahlman]

On 7/25/05, Philip Van Hoof <spam at pvanhoof.be> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 11:08 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> 
> > > For the user "shared themes" is one of the components to make this
> > > happen. Other components are "shared infrastructure" like a shared VFS,
> > > a shared configuration system, a shared calendar, a shared contact list,
> > > a shared presence notification system, a shared panel, a shared file
> > > browser and a shared multimedia infrastructure and framework.
> >
> > Secondly, If you have all of those shared, what remains to be different?
> 
> In my humble opinion should the competition between KDE and GNOME not be
> about competing on infrastructure. But rather about competing on desktop
> applications their implementation.

They shouldn't (and I'm convinced that for most part, aren't)
competing. That only generates bad blood.
 
> > Unless you mean "way to store calendar data" by "calendar" for
> > example, and then it's not infrastructure that should be shared, but
> > standards.
> 
> I can imagine that a service would have to deliver this information to
> the applications that are in need of it. That service, like a database
> or whatever, being a process or not, being a standard or a file or
> whatever, ought to be shared. At this moment: It's not.
>
> Or the library (with or without daemon) that creates "the virtual
> filesystem abstraction layer": This is infrastructure. Not just a
> standard. It's a library. It's a piece of software. It's something that
> ought to be shared. We didn't share it! Why not?

Different goals, lack of communication, some other reason. I don't know.

> I question again: Why are we competing on infrastructure level?!! Why
> did we do that?

Why should different systems be all about competing? If I would write
a calendar app for Gnome, it's not the first thing on my mind that
this should defeat all the KDE/whatever calendar systems nor is it
necessarily on my mind that KDE/whatever apps should share the data.

Not that it isn't good to be compatible, just that it might not be the
top priority.

> > > Therefore I think it IS an appropriate question for xdg-list. Since it's
> > > one of the important components that ought to be shared by KDE and
> > > GNOME.
> 
> > A mutually used standard for theme description would be nice , but I
> > suspect that at implementation level there is so much variation that
> > it'll come down to toolkit-specific hacks (as is the case with
> > metatheme) which kind of defeats the whole idea.
> 
> In that case both the KDE and the GNOME people should stick their heads
> together on some meeting and decide to alter their theming engines so
> that the concept of a shared theme becomes possible. It's not hard, it's
> just combining some politics with engineering.

So you have a list of things that need to be unified?
(It's pretty bold to say "it's not hard" if you don't know what should
be done...)

> My idea was that the
> concept of a free software community was all about finding a way to
> combine politics with engineering. But Oh my .. I was so wrong.

I thought fsc was all about making cool software that everyone can use
and possibly develop urther, not politics. I hope I'm not wrong :)
 
> These days I'm not sure anymore whether or not I'd really like to be a
> member (a developer) of this free software community. We suck at the
> "politics" part, you know. We suck hard.

So just because there exists two different systems, "we suck hard"?

That means that the whole industry sucks pretty damn hard.
 
> What do KDE or GNOME gain from competing on that level? How is it
> interesting to force our users to install two themes? How is it
> interesting to force our artists to create two themes? What are we
> trying to achieve with that?!! World domination on the desktop? Trying
> to do it that way is hilarious.

This is something I have never understood. Why would any group set a
goal to be the only one around? Why not just make a software as good
as one can and leave the world domination part to happen, if it's
going to happen.
 
> We are making our communities and softwares insignificant simply because
> we decided to compete each other on the wrong level. Our potential users
> will NOT accept our wars. Our potential users want it to "just work".
> They don't care about ... KD-whatever or GNO-whatever.

Gnome mostly already "Just Works", and I believe KDE does too. The
fact that they would "Just Work" between each other is a secondary
goal, since if users don't care about the difference, they probably
will use the Gnome apps in Gnome and KDE apps in KDE. You can easily
install any 3rd party app (which KDE  apps are from the
Gnome-point-of-view) and claim that Gnome sucks because it didn't work
well together with it. But would that be a fair statement?

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi