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

[Thiago Macieira]

On Monday, 22 de August de 2011 00:07:54 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> 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.

I'm sorry, I think I've only *now* got your point: your argument is that we're 
not trying to make system services for the platform and we don't have a master 
plan on how to get there. The example of KIO being that it's a great 
technology, but restricted to KDE and there's no effort to expand its userbase.

Akonadi, Solid, Phonon and others are counter-examples: they were designed to 
be part of a platform. They don't have KDE dependencies in their core. Akonadi 
is especially an example of our trying to build a platform, since it was 
proposed to fd.o -- Solid and Phonon are more C++ frameworks abstracting other 
technologies.

Also, I agree that Red Hat is pushing a lot of work into improving the 
platform. Can't fault their engineers for using glib when doing that.

But I still think you give the GNOME team too much credit for having a master 
plan for a platform. From my experience, it's more like us: let's fix what we 
find broken. But unlike us, they're willing to go to a deeper level and fix the 
platform -- HAL, udisks, upower, polkit, consolekit, systemd, etc.

Sometimes it seems like arrogance that they feel they own it all so they can 
change everything. But it can also be called boldness: if it's broken, let's 
redo it. So I agree we're missing a bit of that.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
      E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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