A little review of kdecore & kdeui

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 07 April 2006 15:19, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> But think about it: why shouldn't KDE applications launch the GNOME mail
> program when run inside a GNOME environment?

it should launch whatever the user uses, not the mail app of the desktop. 
that's why have settings for browser, mail and terminal apps in kde.

in another branch of this thread i mentioned the common mimetype spec, and 
really i think that concept holds here: these settings could/should be 
standardized as part of an extended spec for launching apps (which is 
obviously a superset of mimetypes) or just not bothered with.

if we wish to go the route of "all launching should be desktop agnostic" then 
we really ought to push all this down the stack outside of all the desktop 
envs and have a single system service that takes care of all of this. then we 
aren't recursing back into the desktop env, we aren't changing defaults just 
because the user logs into a different desktop and it makes it really clear 
where this stuff is owned.

but then we'll end up with more crap written in C with lowest common 
denominator concepts because outside of any of our given silos nobody can 
make anyone those with the lowest requirements budge. and, of course, we'll 
just end up wrapping that API to make it not so out-of-place.

just how important is it to have kfoo open firefox by default instead of 
konqueror when launched in XFCE?

... and i can't wait until someone hits upon the idea that the "native" 
desktop help application ought to be launched when "Help" is selected from 
the menu, requiring everyone to standardize their help systems and storage.

while standardizing between desktops is a good idea and making it easier for 
ISVs to write software w/out being -requierd- to pick a desktop API is also 
good, i fear that sometimes we lose sight of the reasons we do these things 
and at what cost they come.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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