glib in kdesupport: yes or no?

[Adam Treat]

On Sunday 09 March 2003 11:02 pm, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2003 at 03:21:50PM -0500, Adam Treat wrote:
> > I don't see any technical reason for not using Qt and the functionality
> > it encompasses.  arts today and then what tomorrow? ... or are the GNOME
> > developers going to allow us the use of Qt at all in any of this shared
> > infrastructure?
>
> My feeling is that Qt would be fine in anything that is a separate
> process. I don't think GNOME would be willing to accept GPL libraries
> into a piece of platform all apps had to link to, though.

Why?  GNOME is a GNU project after all and the stated policy of the GNU 
project *prefers* GPL'd libraries.  When you say that GNOME would not be 
willing then could you please explain how GNOME makes these decisions?  It 
seems to me if GNOME wishes to share common infrastructure then they will 
have to get over the issue OR KDE will have to move away from using Qt for 
some very core parts.

> However, the importance of this (and indeed the importance of KDE
> using GLib) seems somewhat overstated to me. The shared implementation
> code that we need to hit the most important usability issues is simply
> not that large.

Hey, I think common specs are fine as long as the spec is good.  We will 
probably still run into some fundamental differences though.  However, I 
don't think you should play down the implementation details.  Can you even 
tell us if you guys are willing to use C++ for any of this?  The stuff on 
your list that is not specs: config, sound system, component/runtime, VFS and 
KIO are not trivial pieces.  I don't want KDE to abandon a successful 
strategy where we use Qt as an underlying basis.

You would have KDE remove these pieces because GNOME still can't get over the 
Qt issue?  No way.  This has been solved a long time ago and it seems that 
the GNOME folks are incapable of moving on and that's not our fault.  To me, 
It's one of the great ironies that GNOME now wishes Qt was not GPL.  And 
please don't bring out the poor proprietary developers.  I really don't care.  
If GNOME is truly interested in cooperation then fine let's get along, but 
shared infrastructure? ... I hope not when you guys still can't resolve your 
issues with Qt.

Adam