Qt/GTK Skinning

Jakub Stachowski qbast at go2.pl
Mon Jul 25 17:05:32 EEST 2005


Dnia poniedziałek, 25 lipca 2005 10:42, Philip Van Hoof napisał:
> 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.
>
> Or perhaps nuances or little differences in "user" experience. I can
> imagine that KMail would want to make a different "user" experience than
> Evolution. They don't have to look exactly the same. That's not what I'm
> suggesting or saying.

So you essentially want to merge KDE, GNOME and hell knows what else. And then 
what? Shoot anybody not agreeing to that 'unified' desktop and forking it or 
creating new one?

>
> They should, however, share the contact list. And if both support
> calendaring, they should share the calendar data!

Well, I'm all for sharing data and data formats. But _not_ implementations.

>
> And they could share the e-mail settings. That way switching between
> KMail and Evolution wouldn't be a such a big step for the user.
>
> Lets be honest: Our users don't care about us wanting them to keep using
> Evolution or KMail. We, as freesoftware warriors, shouldn't try to make
> it difficult for the user to start using that other application. 

Wow, when did it became a war? I sure didn't sign up for one.

> We 
> created this environment to support our vision of a free software
> infrastructure. Right?! Then how come we are making it difficult for
> "users" to really "use" our softwares?
>
> Why are we competing on infrastructure level?!! Why did we started doing
> that?

As usual, because it is normal for developers to have different opinions - 
this is one of difference between them and lemmings. Sorry, it is free 
software and there is no big angry boss to force one solution.

>
> > 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?

Because they have nothing in common except a purpose. They are written in 
different languages, different base libraries, one is in-process, synchronous 
with posix-like API and second is out-of-process, asynchronous with 
completely different API. Are you sure you are so good to tell everybody how 
it should be done?

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

Go to #kde-devel and tell devs to use glib and bonobo. Then go to 
#gnome-hackers and start advocating C++ and kio. You may learn several 
reasons this way.

>
> > > 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. 

> 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.

You are wrong about something else - you assume that every developer out there 
has the same goal as you - some kind of war and seeking world dominance. Can 
you believe that some of us is much more interested in engineering and 
technological side than in war against evil?

>
> 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.

That's why you say 'free software developer' and not 'free software 
politician' :-)

>
> 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.
>
> 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.

And again you assume that it is all about politics and infighting. So here is 
alternative point of view: this is all about doing what you like doing using 
methods that _you_ see best. And yes, it can be gtk+/glib/c for ones and 
qt/c++ for others.

>
> So I repeat myself: The concept of "a shared theme" is an extremely
> important subject for the freedesktop(.org) community.



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