glib in kdesupport: yes or no?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 07:31:03PM -0500, Navindra Umanee wrote: 
> Out of curiosity, do you install the Qt/KDE libs on a default Red
> Hat?

I don't know, oddly enough. ;-) I would have to try it and see.  My
guess is that the default has Qt but not kdelibs, but I could be
wrong.

> Well, given the number of Red Hat installations that have deployed
> KDE, I don't think the latter (removing) would be a good idea.  And of
> course, Red Hat Europe would probably flounder even more if they
> couldn't claim to support KDE.

It'd make people unhappy, yes - one of the reasons we went with the
interoperability approach to solving fragmentation.  We are willing to
endure some pain and effort to get the fragmentation issue fixed, but
if the effort is our engineering effort, that is better than asking
customers to expend their own efforts. And as I said we would like to
keep the whole free software devel community working on a "common
pool" of stuff, because that benefits us and everyone else, while a
protracted "desktop wars" scenario would not.
  
> The default KDE user still has to load and keep around both desktop
> environments from almost the start.  Does this not detract from the
> desktop experience?

It's a downside sure, but you have to weigh it vs. the other issues.

Ideal apps have these kind of characteristics:

 - use one of GTK or Qt, both of those are much better than 
   XUL/VCL/etc.
 - aimed at a general audience, rather than hackers/tweakers/hobbyists
 - accessibility, internationalization, documentation, 
   following UI guidelines, etc.
 - robust community (not just 1 guy) doing active development
 - feature set competitive with proprietary offerings
 - stability (and good release process)
 - works well under both GNOME and KDE, so we don't have 
   to think about *two* apps
 - I'm probably leaving stuff out

None of our current default apps are winners on all those points, so
there's lots of room for switching to something better.

Havoc