kdeinit (was: Summary from Buildsystem BoF at Desktop Summit)

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 08:32:07PM +0200, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On Sunday, 21 de August de 2011 19:13:43 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > > Considering the audience and considering that KDE has more deployments
> > > than GNOME, why can't it be the other way around?
> > 
> > this is where we started from. gnome is now serious about making a
> > complete platform. if they succeed, they will win. big time. that's how
> > apple did it, at the technical level. and how kde won't, due to lack of
> > interest (commercial or otherwise) in that area.
> 
> You seem to imply that we're not serious about doing the same.
>
it's not that we are not serious about it. we don't even try to.

> Your only argument so far was that we have less manpower than the
> GNOME team.
> 
no, my argument is the *complete* lack of manpower directed at creating a
contemporary end-to-end experience for the user and 3rd party developer.
we are doing a desktop and stuff on top of it. sometimes a bit of
platform comes out of it as a side effect, but that's about it.

> If you count Canonical as the big driver for a cohesive desktop
> system, you should count them out already.
> 
i was actually thinking primarily of redhat. but that doesn't matter so
much if the whole community buys into the idea.

> There's code that's barely maintained, true. I can think of KIO, for
> example. 
>
kio and kparts, just like qstyles and some other plugin systems we have
are not *really* part of the os platform. as far as the user is
concerned, only the settings which govern network behavior, widget
looks, etc. and the url syntax are part of the platform; the
implementations are exchangeable.
from a 3rd party dev perspective a common programming platform would be
desirable. but i cannot really assess how useful the ability to provide
universally usable components would be. it always seemed a bit of a
gimmick/niche market to me.

> Do you think all of Gtk and even glib is fully maintained?
> 
i don't consider the toolkits part of the os platform itself. they are
available (the lsb says so) and some are used to build the os platform,
but in principle they are exchangeable.

> Should we pull efforts together? Yeah. Not gonna happen, though.
>
that's a rather sad conclusion.