freedesktop.org interview for OSNews

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Monday 17 November 2003 12:06, Waldo Bastian wrote:
...
> I think those ideas are spot on. The unified MIME associations didn't make
> it in time for KDE 3.2, but I hope to get that implemented in the next KDE
> release. Sharing a VFS framework will be somewhat more difficult Since the
> functionality that KIO offers is quite complex it may not really be
> feasible to fold that all in a common layer. What would be feasible is to
> take a basic subset of functionality common to both VFS and KIO and
> standardize an interface for that. The goal would then be to give
> applications the possibility to fall-back to the other technology with some
> degradation of service in case a specific scheme (e.g. http, ftp, ldap) is
> not available via the native framework. That would also be useful for third
> party applications that do not want to link against VFS or KIO.

I think the major issue is that KDE can use C-libs, but Gnome can't use 
C++-libs, so the things which might be unified, will always end up as 
C-libraries -> i.e. no Qt/KDE, but probably Gtk/Gnome libraries.

Some time ago I had a look at a gnome vfs-module (since I'd actually like to 
write a vfs-module for the lanbrowsing daemon, lisa), and it was, well, I 
didn't like it. Lots of macros, structures with function pointers and other 
things, which can be done much nicer using C++.

OTOH not duplicating efforts is a good thing.

Well, however. Combining efforts is nice, but dropping existing KDE C++ 
technology in favour of a C-reimplementation isn't a very nice perspective.

Just some thoughts
Alex
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