KDE is not an OS platform... (And neither is Gnome)

[nf2]

On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 11:52 AM, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 31 October 2009, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
>> On venerdì 30 ottobre 2009, David Faure wrote:
>> > On Friday 30 October 2009, Benoit Jacob wrote:
>> > > 1) Make sure that both KIO and GVFS can be mounted into the OS's native
>> > >  VFS. 2) Make it so that KIO and GVFS agree on a filesystem layout (a
>> > > "name mangling" if you want) so that the same filename can be used
>> > > regardless of the choice of KIO or GVFS. By a "name mangling" i mean a
>> > > translation from addresses like "sftp://user@server/path" to addresses
>> > > like "/mountpoint/ssh/user/server/path".
>> >
>> > Please keep in mind the difference between sync and async APIs.
>> >
>> > You download a file over FTP. KIO is async: the application remains
>> >  responsive, you get a progress dialog. The "native VFS" is most of the
>> >  time used in a blocking way. fopen,fwrite,fclose. Which means the
>> >  application freezes until the FTP server sends the whole data. Not good.
>> > A remote filesystem is NOT like the local filesystem.
>>
>> Well, the filesystem calls are synchronous, yes, but that's not a problem
>>  for the file:// kioslave, is it?
>
> Right. But my point is that people saying "by mounting stuff into the filesystem
> we can allow even non-KDE non-Gnome applications to benefit from kioslaves"
> are omitting the fact that those non-kde non-gnome applications would then
> use synchronous API, and would block for a very long time.
> So a KIO-like API is needed. So mounting things into a filesystem mountpoint
> doesn't get you anything.
>


I agree. GUI applications should always use async APIs like KIO or
GIO. But: At the moment many of them won't, because that implies
deciding for a certain desktop environment. That's the problem i would
like to solve.

The free desktop desperately needs those 3rd party applications, and
it's definitely not in the market position to tell application
developers: "Then you just write your application twice! One for KDE
and one for Gnome".

Regards,
Norbert