Efficient Coding Strategy for Desktop Environment Development

[Ulrik Mikaelsson]

I couldn't resist replying to this as well.

FreeDesktop, whose technologies are quite often assimilated by KDE, is still
a _little_ bit more focused on the Gnome desktop, from my perspective. Or
rather, the Gnome Desktop more often contribute, and push their standards to
FreeDesktop, while KDE (from my former KDE-ist, now Gnomish perspective)
more often develop their potentially mutually beneficial projects in the
dark, and KDE-specific, rather than pushing it to FreeDesktop. Examples of
this include:

* Tracker/Strigi, whereas Tracker is becoming a usable FreeDesktop standard,
while Strigi seems to be somewhat behind. Both are similar in concept,
namely a DBUS-daemon offering index, contextual search, and meta-storage.
Seems like an ideal example for cooperation.
* Telepathy/Decibel, again pretty much the same use-cases, but duplicated
effort. (Whereas Telepathy is the FreeDesktop project, and Decibel
KDE-specific.)
* HAL/Solid, HAL beeing the FreeDesktop offering, while Appeal is again
KDE-specific. In this case, though, I fully understand KDE:s desire to not
incorporate HAL, since I personally have found HAL to offer little
abstraction over what suitable kernel interfaces already abstracted for us,
HAL being Linux specific, and so on. However, again KDE have not to my
knowledge pushed for FreeDesktop adoption.

I don't know what have created this quite Gnomish environment in
FreeDesktop, but just like Elias, I think it's sad to see effort beeing
duplicated at LEAST twice. (Then often E17, XFCE and friends duplicate the
effort even some times more, such as with printing, for instance.)

As if it duplicated effort weren't enough, often this leads to duplicated
system resources beeing used, for instance my running a Gnome Desktop with
Kate as my prefered editor, I have to run all the Gnome core services, AND
the KDE ones. I dare the day both HAL and Solid will poll my bus:es several
times/second, just to see if there's something new there.

I'd say, for any _system service_, please try to cooperate, instead of
compete. Gnome/KDE isn't really the ones we're fighting.

On 11/12/06, Mario Vukelic <mario.vukelic at dantian.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2006-11-11 at 18:56 +0100, Elias Humbolt wrote:
> > we should ensure in the future, that this does not happen
> > again. Common grounds must be found, universal tools created, efforts
> > shared.
>
>
> http://freedesktop.org/ seems to be the correct place for this. Gnome
> and KDE both have a quite good record for adopting freedesktop
> standards, and you yourself mention dbus, which comes from the
> freedesktop people, http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-devel mailing list
> ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
>
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