Redefining kdelibs and kdebase

[Joseph Wenninger]

I'm not that sure that restricting apps to use a standard dialog is the way to 
go, which would be the result if you have an out of process generic file or 
print dialog. There are cases where you need to have more control over the 
widgets even in a standard dialog. Eg. it would be very bad if kate  runs in 
in GNOME and you can't choose the encoding of the file to open or load. In 
other applications (ok, it kate too) there is also a need for additional 
settings in the print dialog, it would be very hard to support that with a 
gnome or windows print dialog. Even a lot of native windows applications 
(think about graphic applications) don't use the default windows printing 
dialog but there own specialised one.

The point is, why do we have to limit KDE with generic support for other 
deskops ? Who is maintaining the wrappers around gtk, windows, cocoa ? Do we 
have to do that ourselves ?

Another thing to consider, face  it our main platform is X11 and/or embedded. 
That's about 80% or even more. I don't think we should limit KDE to comfort 
20% even less. We should try to be consistent within our DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT, 
not consistent with every broken GUI toolkit. I don't say we should make it 
extremly hard for others who really want to use native windows or macos 
ports, but I do think, we should not restrict ourselves because of such 
ports.
Even if we would use windows dialogs or gtk dialogs or ....., we still would 
not fit in because of the different HIGs.

KDE is a Desktop Environment, not a simple Qt extension. If Trolltech really 
wants to use KDE dialogs they could write their own layer and use the static 
methods we already have for their purposes. The only really hindering thing 
is KApplication, which should be solvable by moving most things out of their 
into a singleton.


If we restrict ourselves to a bare minimum of features, we would remove all 
our distinguishing features. So what's the reason to install KDE at all (for 
a user or distribution) ?

Kind regards
Joseph Wenninger