Comments on GNOME Foundation?
Gael Duval
gduval at mandrakesoft.com
Mon Aug 21 15:18:52 PDT 2000
Aaron Gaudio a écrit :
> I think LSB should remain completely environment neutral until one
> environment overwhelmingly dominates the installed base. It's
> confusing to provide two completely different standards. Hopefully,
> one day, Gnome and KDE can come together and, if not produce a single
> environment, can at least cooperate on the lower-level aspects and
> thus provide a commonality that LSB or another standards project
> could base their work on.
Well - I feel that it's not a good solution because everybody knows
it's likely that there won't be any desktop environment which will
dominate the other, nor a common one... In my opinion, if we do as you
write, it's the same as doing nothing.
> Also it should be pointed out that KDE, Gnome and LessTiff do not
> fit together. LessTiff is a widget set, whereas KDE and Gnome are
> environments.
I was concerned about programming environments. The real question for
an independant developper or a software company that wants to start
programming for Linux is: "what tools can I use/am I provided to make
my desktop software?". Translation: which API can I use so I my
program can run on most Linux distros? Concretely, you can use among
others(if you want to write open-source software):
- low level:
Xlib
- medium level:
LessTiff
Gtk
Qt
- high level:
Gtk + Gnome devel libs
Qt + KDE devel libs
I think that LSB should accept the current situation: there are two
main high-level programming environments under Linux: Gtk+Gnome
libs/Qt+KDE libs.
> KDE, Gnome and CDE are the three big environments that
> are competing (and one day, maybe cooperating) in Unixland. If Sun
> sticks to their commitments, CDE may be on the way out (although
> it's still used extensively on other commerical Unices). As for
> widget sets, there are plenty, but Qt, Gtk+ and Motif/LessTiff seem
> to be the biggies. I haven't kept up with Qt licensing issues, but
> I have a feeling it wouldn't be accepted into LSB (and I personally
> don't think it should). LessTiff is an implementation of Motif, which
> few in the free software world want to use anyhow. Gtk+ is the dominant
> widget set, I'd say, and if the LSB gets into the scope of graphical/X11
> environments, I would argue that it should include Gtk+ (and its
> dependancies) as requirements, regardless of desktop environment employed.
It would be good if we could avoid talking about politics when talking
about standardizing Linux. If we are at this level, I really can't see
how LSB can achieve its goal and the result will be that IBM/Sun and
other big traditionnal Unix makers will do the choices.
Greets,
Gael.
--
< Gael DUVAL http://www.mandrake.com >
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