[brainstorm] A kind of Solid for low-level software, one more KDE pillar

[Bráulio Barros de Oliveira]

Hello dear KDE folks,

After looking to KDM's and related and I saw there is a many things that
could go to multiplatform paradigm present in KDE4.
When I saw KDM inspecting directly to linux proc and parsing it files'
strings, that has no standard format, I became sad that its was a so
low-level access and so platform-dependent.

Solid is hell promissing and necessary. It is *yet* not multiplatform but it
will be surely be one day. It is a abstration to hardware and we might
should think of an abstraction to low-level software, or to the OS software.
As most OS were influenced or derived from Unix (even Windows was, in fact,
heavily), they are share a lot of concepts, like processes, users,
authentification, etc. Most of them are so imported and standardized that is
already abstracted and multiplatform, like network api (like sockets), in Qt
and KDE. kdelibs for example has a some of these also, like kdesu and why
not consider KIO.
Also, the operating system a lot of times goes so close to the hardware that
sometimes it is hard to see limit of the hardware abstraction and the
low-level software abstraction.

But yet we are still to far from that abstraction, unfortunetely. We are
still working on high-level abstraction for our Unixes or even for our Linux
distributions, like PolicyKit and ConsoleKit. I'd surely be please to have
the time/oportunity to do those things. KDM, Ksysguard, and many others
would benefit a lot from these APIs.

I can't get rid of a lot of bullshit I'm saying as my ignorance doesn't
allow me to, so please say how wrong I am.
Brainstorming and discussing are so funny and inevitable, but I already
reached the limits of my imagination for now, so show me yours. :)

bráulio

PS: sorry for the bad english and mainly for the misexpression and poor
objetiveness.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20080717/b87eb25a/attachment.htm>