Efficient Coding Strategy for Desktop Environment Development

[Elias Humbolt]

How more Code could be shared between "competing" Desktops Environments
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I understand Ubuntu as a project where people of different interests and
origin build their dreams together on common ground. We have come far
but it is still far to go until we can really say, we live/develop
following the concept mentioned above.

At the current time I still see talent, time and energy wasted by Ubuntu
family members of different religion each one trying to reinvent it's
own wheel. Instead they should create one stable felly together and
apply their unique touch to it by adding their custom hub cap.

A good example for illustration is network-manager. The deamon running
in the background represents the felly, the common ground. And the Gnome
and KDE GUIs represent the individual hub caps.

This approach ensures there are not two incompatible implementations for
the same problem in Ubuntu like powernowd and kpowersaved. And work is
not lost, like all the KDE attempts to create a config utility for wlan
devices. Or even like with dcop which will be replaced by dbus in KDE4.

Possibly dcop could be what dbus is nowadays, if only this technology
would not have been hidden inside kdelibs, unaccessible for anybody
interested, only to be available when installing kdelibs and even the QT
library which it depends on.

For that reason huge coding efforts are lost for ever, programming hours
wasted, because of course it does not make sense for KDE to maintain
dcop if dbus is around anyway and fulfils the same purpose.

Consequently, we should ensure in the future, that this does not happen
again. Common grounds must be found, universal tools created, efforts
shared.

The next best candidates would be:
Power Management and Laptop Buttons

Both could be handled by a daemon and controled by an individual GUI in
each desktop environment. Other candidates could certainly be
identified.

Great things could be acieved if Ubuntu when all it's flavours act like
a big family. The efforts of the one family member should also be
beneficial for the other members as well.

Wasn't this the idea of Open Source anyway?

https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/efficient-coding-strategy
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EfficientCodingStrategySpec

Elias