Portability

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Reset Reboot wrote:
> Well, talking about portability, I think we should stick to Linux and
> other POSIX compliant operating systems. When I talk about portability,
> I'm talking about being desktop independent, in the X Server
> environment. So using GTK would force KDE users to get those libs, and I
> think we should avoid that. With Cairo and Xlib we are fairly
> independent and should give this project to become a mainstream app for
> accessibility, and we help the vast majority of desktops.
>   
I think we should have easy portability to KDE as a key design goal as 
we go along here. We can start out making a Gnome-based app to start 
with but we should make it as easy for ourselves as possible to share 
the love with KDE soon thereafter.

There are at least two good strategic reasons for this:

 * The assistive technology community on Linux is very small and we can 
use all the common momentum we can find. Several KDE devs have already 
expressed an interest in this project and I'd like to see that continue.
 * KDE4 is meant to support AT-SPI. I'm not sure how much progress has 
been made on this, but clearly having some credible assitive apps 
running on KDE will only help that along.

See: http://accessibility.freestandards.org/a11yweb/forms/soi.php

If we draw the keys with Cairo or even xlib, that already represents 
most of the application. We'll probably need to use a toolkit for some 
things be we can make an effort to restrict that to simple stuff that 
can be easily rewritten.

I'll get some opinions from people with more experience of xlib vs. 
Cairo and python vs. C. We could also put the different options up on 
the wiki with lists of pros and cons.

I'd actually also like to keep the door open for a Windows port. That 
could potentially be of great help to some people and would make the 
transition to Linux easier for them.

- Henrik