glib in kdesupport: yes or no?

[Neil Stevens]

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On Tuesday March 11, 2003 05:51, Marc Mutz wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 March 2003 00:33, Maks Orlovich wrote:
> <snip>
>
> > All I mean is that it's not accurate that all this interoperability
> > stuff is without cost, and that it can in fact harm users pretty
> > directly, by diverting developer users. And since I particularly care
> > deeply about a commitment to existing users and developers, I find
> > that cost non-trivially high.
>
> <snip>
>
> You fail to take the long-term benefits of a single solution into
> account. Granted, in the short-term, development power may be slightly
> redirected to the unification, but once obtained, the unified solution
> makes much less trouble, because:
>
> 1. More users use it, so bugs get found and squashed quicker
> 2. More developers use it, so it's bound to be more generic and flexible
> a solution than the homebrewn one.

More generic, less flexible, but also less powerful.  We have to compromise 
anything that doesn't fit with the lowest common denominator.

It's also not necessarily easier to maintain.  "Plain C" is more 
error-prone and harder to maintain than a decent language with a decent 
toolkit.

> What you say, instead, is "forget standards and do your own thing".

... which is what has worked for a long time.  

> I hear this surprisingly often recently in the KDE community, and always
> it's the "user's benefit" that is dragged along as an excuse to not
> talk with other people.

But it is for the user benefit.  Right now, KDE is pleasing its users.  
Some people wish us to throw away things that are working and pleasing 
people in order to court people who by definition aren't using KDE so 
much.

I ask you:  What does replacing KDE tech with plain C tech do to benefit 
people who use KDE?  Not users of GNOME apps, but users who actually use 
the apps we ship?

> But I think this is a dangerous path to follow, leading to where
> Microsoft went years before.

And Microsoft pleases many of its users.  Seems to me you'd have us go the 
way of Motif technology.  Standards at the cost of usefulness.

- -- 
Neil Stevens - neil at qualityassistant.com
"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep
thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the 
same
act as the destroyer of liberty." -- Abraham Lincoln
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