Efficient Coding Strategy for Desktop Environment Development

[Krzysztof Lichota]

Ulrik Mikaelsson napisał(a):
> 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.

Most KDE technologies are C++ based which is hard to swallow for other
projects using C. Also they are using Qt facilities which make
programming much easier, but hard to adopt by others due to licensing
reasons.

> Examples of this include:
> 
> * Tracker/Strigi, whereas Tracker is becoming a usable FreeDesktop
> standard, while Strigi seems to be somewhat behind. 

What do you mean by "behind"? It has some unique features (like indexing
nested archives). And Tracker is not "standard", it is an app.
Freedesktop should provide specification of indexing service, not
implementations (apart from infrastructure, like DBUS).

> * 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.

Solid is higher level library than HAL. And it must work also on Windows.

> 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.

Regarding Solid/HAL - it won't. Solid will _use_ HAL as a backend.
As for other core services, I would like to see cooperation too.
But I guess it won't happen until Gnome starts using objective
interfaces (C++) instead of plain C (disclaimer: it has been a long time
since I had seen any Gnome service, so please correct me if I am wrong,
maybe Gnome is using C++ already?).

My 2c.

	Krzysztof Lichota


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