[Desktop_architects] Portland: The LinuxDesktopIntegrationInterface

[Bastian, Waldo]

>If you develop an MFC app, you don't need to worry about half of your
>customers running a flavor of Windows where MFC is a second class
>citizen and various stuff doesn't work.  My impression, as an ISV, is
>that if I came to you and said "I want to make my application work
>really well under KDE - I want every bell and whistle you can offer,
>what should I do?"  The answer would quickly come back as: "Learn Qt,
>then dive in."  I would get a similar response from Gnome for
Glib/GTK+.
>
>I agree with you that the library or widget set is not the issue.  The
>issue is that by choosing a library or widget set, I also dictate my
>customer's environment. ISVs are very reluctant to dictate environments
>to their customers because they get very mad at us when we do.

I think the key here is to start looking at "desktop environment" and
"development library stack" as two separate things with separate goals.
That hasn't happened so far because the "development library stack" is
used to implement the "desktop environment" and because desktop services
have traditionally been implemented as part of the "development library
stack".

To change that I think we should look to externalize the services that
are currently implemented in the "development library stack", move them
to the "desktop environment" part and have well-defined specifications
that describe their interfaces. The "development library stack" can then
be based on these specifications instead of implicitly defining the
desktop environment themselves.

Cheers,
Waldo