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[Eike Hein]

> [...]
> So it's not a question of KDE changing its conventions 
> to suit other platforms - the possible requirement is 
> to enable applications to appear differently depending 
> on which _desktop environment_ they are running on, 
> rather than which _operating system_ they are on.

Well, originally, it was proposed to change KDE's con-
ventions not on the merit of the change itself, but to
adhere to the conventions of other desktops. As the
discussion developed, it was proposed to make the cap-
tion appearance desktop-specific to cater to both in-
terests.

At the center of which lies the question wether we,
the KDE project, are developing kdelibs only to write
applications for the KDE desktop, or if we're willing
to incur the overhead of developing kdelibs as a plat-
form for cross-desktop, cross-platform development.

As implementations of the conclusion to allow efforts
to port to win32 and osx permeate the codebase, we're
going to see an increasing number of proponents of
the latter, younger camp in the developer base, as
kdelibs potentially provides quite a bit of value
even to an application that isn't interested in the
KDE desktop and its conventions at all. As that group
asks for visible changes that compete with existing
implementations geared towards the KDE conventions
and best practices, we'll have to figure out ways to
reconcile both fronts.


To make it clear, my personal interest is in KDE as
a free desktop ecosystem and in developing applica-
tions targeted at that environment, so I feel it's
important to approach such decisions aware of the
possible implications for that agenda.


-- 
Regards,
Eike Hein, hein at kde.org