[quanta-devel] Re: Moving Kommander Executor to kdelibs

[Eric Laffoon]

On Friday 05 November 2004 12:24 pm, Alexander Dymo wrote:
> First, I'd like to mention that kommander is a tool, not a library so
> I don't think it can belong to kdelibs. Second, it's not something
> that should be in kdebase. Let's be realistic - no normal (dummy ;))
> KDE user would use commander.
> Kommander is a tool for developers and should be in one of development
> modules in KDE. At this time I know about three such modules: kdewebdev,
> kdevelop, and kdesdk.

I know Michal addressed this, but I'd like to be very clear setting the record 
straight.

1) The Kommander Editor is a tool, as we all agree.
2) The executor is basically the runtime for Kommander and as such is critical 
for the use and acceptance of it. If we know currently kdewebdev is installed 
then it is there. If it were in kdesdk then it would be relegated to 
developers.
3) Kommander is more for developers now than common users, but much of this is 
because the design is in transition, the documentation is not up to date (not 
surprising as it's a moving target) and it acceptance among users is limited 
also because of lack of exposure or it not being availabe.

When comparing Kommander to other development platforms it is actually less 
appealing to C++ developers because they can do what it does without the 
constraints and without learning anything new... (though they would likely be 
impressed with the development speed once things are smoothed out) But for 
non C++ non developers it is probably the easiest platform to develop small 
applications on. It is fundamentally targetted to be no more difficult than a 
spreadsheet to use, which is a mainstream application. By the time we reach 
KDE 4 it has substantial potential for:
- developers to prototype with
- developers to build no compile application extentions outside release 
schedules (using DCOP and i18n)
- a new class of small application developers
- users to create quick extentions to applications and for application 
integration

Internal DCOP on the average PC can perform several thousand operations per 
second so this can build small to medium size MainWindow applications. Also 
we will be working to make sure it is extended for good universal scripting 
language support, meaning a totally inclusive tool that can support mixed 
language scripting in a single application. With user enhancements and 
plugins this becomes a major attraction for adopting KDE. If the executor is 
not installed with kdelibs or at least with a fair degree of certainty then 
the adoption of Kommander will suffer. In my opinion this would be a loss for 
KDE, users and computing in general... but that's just my opinion. ;-)

KDE 4 should be the target though.
-- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://quanta.sourceforge.net  sequitur at kde.org
Mailing list - http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/quanta
GPG Fingerprint: 48FB 218D 747F A54A 319D EE98 4A25 794E A453 004B
http://quanta.sourceforge.net/developer/keys/Eric_Laffoon_pubkey.asc