[Kde-accessibility] Qt and accessibility on Unix

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

Hi Volker,
<SNIP>
> Well, we will certainly not make Qt depend on ATK+AT-SPI+CORBA, even
> though it's not on me to make this decision. A plugin solution seems to
> be a reasonable idea, but requires Qt to be present as a shared library
> (since the plugin will also link against Qt) - this is not a problem for
> KDE, but software vendors often tend to ship Qt statically linked to
> avoid conflicts with existing Qt libraries. Plugin based solutions also
> tend to bring in all sort of trouble, e.g. difference in Qt versions the
> plugins and the applications depend on etc. Otherwise, interfacing with
> a plugin is technically no big issue.

Why not make Qt on Unix depend on ATK+AT-SPI+CORBA? It already has established itself
as the standard for doing Unix accessibility and will ship with all major versions 
of Linux and Unix. It can't see that linking to these libraries is more controversial
than linking to XFree for graphics or fontconfig for font access.

There has been some misconceptions I think in these threads about the nature of glib, 
but as I pointed out in my post to dot.kde.org glib is not a gui library at all. All glib 
does is offer is data structure handling for C, portability wrappers, and 
interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading, 
and an object system. glib do not pull in any further dependencies.

In fact libraries that KDE already use like pkgconfig actually contains code cut and pasted 
from glib, and if GStreamer ends ups being shared between GNOME and KDE (which we are working 
with Tim Janssen to make happen), then there are also another major component that use this 
basic utility library.

So statements about depending on GNOME is not correct as these libs live on the very bottom
of the GNOME chain togheter with other libs like XFree, glibc, fontconfig, scrollkeeper, libxml etc., but 
there is nothing GUI related in them at all. I mean if XFree got put into GNOME CVS would that make
XFree a 'GNOME' library?

Hope I didn't offend anyone with this mail, I am just so tired of Microsoft winning because
we divide and conquer ourselves.

Sincerely,
Christian




-- 
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus@linuxrising.org>