D-Conf

[Kevin Krammer]

On Sunday 06 March 2005 01:23, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

This is getting a bit offtopic at least for this thread, but here we go:

> But it's really time that some high-level discussions start. At this
> moment the community of GNOME developers isn't informed about any
> efforts being made getting KDE and GNOME working together. If you guys
> have indeed started working together, how come the results of that
> aren't being publicised? Or am I missing something important?

We as application developers are not directly affected by those chances, our 
core developers are.
They implement the new shared specifications in our libraries and build 
systems, we just our APIs as usual.

If developers are interested in the ongoing efforts, like you and me, they can 
subscribe to this list and stay updated or even participate in the 
discussions.

> It would be great if for example the GNOME foundation and the important
> KDE organisations started organising meetings and started talking. Why
> meetings and talking: To make sure that both environments aren't
> creating yet another technology that has already been build by the other
> team that can perfectly be shared.

If I remember correctly this has been common on the developer level for years 
now, e.g. KDE developers attending GUADEC and GNOME developers attending 
KDE's developer conferences.

> Given the fact that both projects share the same goals. I fail to see
> how it could have happen that both created their own VFS-layer and their
> own configuration-layer. That was an error in our development models.
> Both should have shared one common technology. Period.

Developers usually focus on areas they are most interested in and local goals 
might be different or have different priorities.
It would be a waste of time to synchronise that between two projects of that 
size, with different release cycles and all.
Better take the evolutionary approach and create new shared specifications and 
implementations based on the knowledge gathered in years of usage of 
different "prototypes", each having their own weaknesses.

Creating the one-fits-all solution up-front will usually fail miserably.

> I'm not just a user who's whining about this. I am an application
> developer and I really really hate the fact that I'm forced to choose
> sides. OR I'm a GNOME developer. OR I'm a KDE developer.

You could use a wrapper API like wxWidgets and leave the unpleasant details on 
desktop integration to the developers of that wrapper.
(I know wxWidgets is not a good example here as they currently don't have a 
desktop level implementation on X11, but in theory they could)

> Things need to change.
> We NEED to start working together.

Thank you for pointing that out, we must have been subscribed here for pure 
fun reasons until now and only "incidentally" use the same specifications for 
things like application starter menu, trash, notification area/system tray, 
window manager hints, ...

Cheers,
Kevin