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

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Wednesday 28 October 2009, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On October 28, 2009, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > Hmm, I don't really understand this email.
>
> the bits of context which are missing, and make it very hard to understand
> nf's email, are:
>
> * nf2 would like to have KIO use GIO; this is part of a general idea to
> make as much of KDE's "behind the scenes" infrastructure use things
> implemented in C on top of glib. the idea communicated to me on irc is that
> "glib and C is _the_ platform here, so we should use it instead of anything
> we make on our own".
>
> * this has been discussed at great lengths a few times on irc and on
> mailing lists (inc this one); the discussions have included nf2,
> maintainers of the software in question and others with interests in these
> technologies
>
> * nf2 has indeed done the "right thing" in that he's actually written code
> to match his ideas; actually writing code is really more than many others
> can say, and i do respect that quite a bit about nf2 and his ideas on these
> matters

That much I knew, just for the specific mail it wasn't clear what exactly he 
meant.

> * for various reasons, the approaches taken by nf2's code have been turned
> down by maintainers (such as Kevin Ottens as seen on
> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/1951/ ... Kevin's reply there is pretty
> "short" because it's a discussion he and nf2 have already had in the past
> and i can empathize with Kevin's lack of desire to be forced into having
> that same conversation repeatedly)

I didn't actually look at the patch in detail, but from the comments I had the 
impression that the purpose of the patch is to make the KDE places more 
flexible by adding pluggable backends ?
Doesn't sound that bad to me.

> it's one of those unfortunate circumstances where someone has written code
> that doesn't mesh with the upstream project maintainer's goals. i do think
> nf2 has all the best of intentions and certainly has put in good amounts of
> effort (nf2 is also very pleasant to work with, i might add :). the

And we met at Akademy :-)

Alex