Cross toolkit consistency (Was: glib in kdesupport: yes or no?)

[Waldo Bastian]

On Sunday 09 March 2003 23:12, Tim Jansen wrote:
> On Sunday 09 March 2003 22:26, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
> > (2) using the lower level services doesn't really work well, if there are
> >   two incompatible implementations of them - you will have two
> > configurations which would ideally be in sync, but are not - you see this
> > with the sound server or with KIO or with the Evolution mail handling ;
> > it is hard to understand to users what exactly goes wrong if something
> > works in one application, but not in another
>
> But what do you expect? It is relatively easy to use common icons or a
> common system for installing .desktop files. But unifying things like
> KPart/Bonobo, DCOP/CORBA and the underlying APIs is almost impossible
> without a re-design of a lot of things. And unifying common dialogs, like
> the file dialog, would require 100% code duplication and huge coordination
> problems (because they must be synced all the time - if you change the Qt
> dialog you must change the Gtk/Gnome dialog at the same time).

You can go along way by creating a small API library that provides access to 
the file dialog of the desktop you are running in... I know that Matthias 
Ettrich considered such idea quite a while ago already to solve the problem 
that Qt applications don't integrate that well into the KDE desktop. Same for 
messageboxes, which at the same time could solve the problem that code in 
libkdecore can't show KDE's own standardized messageboxes.

I think there are plenty solutions possible once developers start to take the 
need for cross toolkit consistency seriously enough. I don't think that time 
is there yet, but it might be something to consider for KDE 4.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com