glib in kdesupport: yes or no?

[Zack Rusin]

On Sunday 09 March 2003 03:42, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> The distinction between "is a GNOME developer" and "is a KDE
> developer" only exists in our minds, at least I think that is so. It
> is artifically heightened whenever we see GNOME and KDE as seperate
> projects. I think they are the same thing, really.

How many KDE developers can Bonobonize their apps? How many GNOME 
developers can KPartify their apps? That's a pretty real distinction to 
me. Just because both groups can code in C and C++ doesn't make them 
the same. We're all coders, that's it, don't be pushing it. 

> Thus, at this point in time, I see no longer a reason to upkeep not
> demanding KDE developers from using glib whereever they see it fits
> their needs best, and GNOME developers from using Qt whereever they
> see it fits their needs best. Then, if we'd made this step in our
> minds, the projects would naturally start to converge, and all of us
> would benefit.

Well, the only area where GLib offers an extended functionality is the 
unicode area so you're stretching it by saying "KDE developers". It 
might be "KDE developer who work on non-KDE project" because if they'd 
be working on KDE projects then they would use Qt/KDE provided 
functionality and don't need GLib.

> Thus, the only question to judge for whether or not I put glib-2.0 in
> kdesupport seems to me: "is it practical to do so".
>
> For me, its extremely unpractical, because I already have a
> distribution that gets glib-2.0 for me, and also includes pkg-config,
> and I don't want two versions. Thus, I think it might be inconvenient
> for a lot of other developers as well, due to the same reasoning.

I don't know how many people don't have GLib installed at this point and 
time but isn't the reason behind kdesupport to provide third-party 
libraries which are required by core components? Writting a configure 
check that checks whether GLib/pkg-config are installed and installing 
them if they're not might be a reasonable solution.

> And if you still think KDE and GNOME are seperate projects, and for
> that reason don't want to install glib-2.0 on your system, I think
> you're keeping up the illusion that KDE and GNOME are working on
> different goals. They are not. Thus, this is no valid reason for me.

This is a fallacy. By this theory I'm also an Enlightenment and GNUStep 
developer. And yes, GNOME and KDE are different projects, as long as 
we'll have separate CVS respiratory's those will be separate projects, 
simple as that. 

Zack 

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