kdeinit (was: Summary from Buildsystem BoF at Desktop Summit)

[John Layt]

On Saturday 20 Aug 2011 13:11:32 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 12:20:55PM +0200, Thiago Macieira wrote:

> > It needs a global spec too, since global shortcut grabbing with X11 libs
> > only is sorely lacking. I think the solution we made for KDE 4 is
> > actually quite good. Anyone wants to create an XDG spec for global
> > accelerators?
> 
> well, yeah. good luck to whoever. :P

We had a bad experience last time, but we should use that experience to play 
smarter this time around.  The big complaints that I saw from Gnome last time 
was that we supposedly had no clear statement of why the spec was needed and 
what it was meant to achieve, that they had no real involvment in the drafting 
of the spec, that we talked to the wrong people, and that it was something 
they didn't need in G3.

So lets turn that on its head.  Lets write a statement saying why we need a 
spec and what it needs to achieve.  Mention we have an existing solution that 
would be a good starting point, but don't actually detail it.  Then send that 
to xdg and Gnome and Unity and anyone else asking who are the right pople to 
talk to.  Hopefully those people then decide it's a good thing and agree to 
work together to develop a standard.  If they're not interested then we get to 
draft it ourselves knowing there can be no complaints.

> > But just as before, I don't see why our code can't be cross-desktop. So
> > no argument in favour of dropping kglobalaccel.
> 
> i think it is pretty clear that our *code* is not going to be accepted
> as the cross-desktop solution. seeing the reluctance to anything with g*
> within our community, why do you think the gnomers would embrace
> anything with a q* or even k*, esp. given that it usually weights in at
> least twice as much as the typical g* solution?

We depend on a lot of g code these days, some of it even willingly, and we're 
looking at even more.  As for Gnome never accepting any q/k code, it's mostly 
true, but copying is the sincerest form of flattery :-)  Can we actually point 
to cases where Gnome rejected Qt/KDE code proposals, and how about ones that 
have been accepted (Poppler?).

I'm not convinced it's really about the weight or otherwise of our solutions 
(system-config-printer is written in python!).  How much is just C vs C++, or 
our not pushing stuff, or just not having key people employed by the distros?  
I'd like to see what happens when Qt5 has a nice light QtCore that we use to 
write something small and light that they need.

John.