KDE vs. native/Qt file dialogs

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

This came up thanks to a recent commit to KDevPlatform (8830685c). There are now 2 locations where the KDE_FULL_SESSION env. variable is used to determine whether or not the KDE file dialog should be used.

I find that a bit misplaced as that dialog doesn't have anything that links it so tightly to KDE sessions that it is misplaced everywhere else. Rather, it has a number of features that I find quite useful also on Mac, esp. when opening a project. For one, the Mac-native file dialog doesn't allow selecting a Make/CMake/QMake/.kdev4/etc file, at least not when there is already a .kdev4 project in the directory.

What do others think? Customised open/save dialogs are not uncommon on neither Mac nor MS Windows, and the KDE dialog works fine with the native macintosh style (I can't check on MS Win.). Would there be demand and support for making the KDE file dialog available as a build-time option, or maybe even as a runtime preference (like OpenOffice/LibreOffice does)? In the latter case one could link the initial/default setting to KDE_FULL_SESSION.

One could also just set KDE_FULL_SESSION but from what I've seen that variable is used in a few locations to control features that are best left off when you're not running a full KDE session.

R.