kde decoupled from qt ( an outlandish or implausible idea? )

[Kevin Krammer]

On Friday 12 December 2003 20:12, corey_s at cox.net wrote:

> Greetings - I'm new to the list, have been avidly following KDE's progress
> over the years, and very much appreciate the foundational libraries and
> components that KDE provides; very cool and impressive stuff, and getting
> better constantly.

Thanks :)

> other things. As well, gui's simply don't fit with my own baised sense of
> aesthetics - I love text, I love the keyboard, I love xterms, and I love
> minimism. I don't have issue with QT, I have issue with gui's.

So actually you want get rid of the X dependency, not Qt.
Qt can be used without X as well, even the standard X11 version used on Linux 
distros can be used for apps running without an X server.

> What I _do_ like however, are extremely rich backend
> interfaces/libs/components etc, that provide a ton of extremely useful and
> well-integrated foundational functionality from which to build applications
> - this is where we all know kde totally shines, the next closest thing, I
> _guess_, would be GNUStep/Cocoa - a far cry, certainly.

Yes, KDE's achitecture is really awesome.

> So, perhaps this is just too bad for me - I should either get over it, or
> compromise, or forget about it and not use kde. But maybe not...

Not necessarily.
KDE's main goal is Unix desktop which usually means X11 environment.
So some code makes direct use of X11 API, but others doesn't.
For example there is a kdenox module in CVS, containing portions of kdelibs 
which had X stuff removed, to enable usage on embedded plattforms, like PDAs 
(Konqueror/embedded, KOrganizer/embedded)

> What I'm interested in is hopefully getting some straight opinions and
> detailed information regarding the possibility (the pipe-dream??) of
> perhaps considering the idea of decoupling/abstracting the backend kde libs
> from qt - so that a project could be born with the purpose of creating a
> completely gui-toolkit neutral kde, or something equivilant.

That would be extremley difficult.
One would have do do a complete replacement for Qt.
Might be doable for certain parts, Apple did so for KHTML, but would be quite 
an effor for all KDE packages.

So far your interest seems to be getting KDE framework usable for console 
applications, which, as I tried to explain above, does in no way create a 
need to remove Qt.

> To start, which of the kde api's could most easily be used completely
> outside of qt? I'd love to be able to have the power of kio in my xsession
> throughout all apps - like to have the ability of, something along the
> lines of: "cd ftp://blah.org" right in my command shell, or to build a
> console/curses based version of kaddress book - that sorta thing.

Yeah, would be cool!
Again no problem with Qt here, Qt4 will have an even better structure 
supporting this (base functionality and GUI stuff in separate libs)

> Is this completely whacked, or just unfeasable? ... or both?

I'd say it is unfeaseble.
However making KDE framework available to console applications sounds like a 
great idea and should be achievable.

I think some core developer even mentioned something like this on his blog on 
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/

Cheers,
Kevin
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