Re: KDE and Gnome

[Russell Miller <rmiller duskglow com>]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 03:16:44PM -0700, Taj Morton wrote:
> Hello Everyone,

Hello Taj,

No, you haven't offended me, but this is something that has been hashed over
again and again.  What follows is simply my personal opinion.

Interoperation with gnome is certainly a worthwhile goal, and in a perfect
world there would be one desktop with the best features of both kde and
gnome.  Sadly, we don't live in a perfect world.  KDE and gnome simply have
different goals and different ways of meeting those goals.

What's also important to remember is that the people who develop these
programs are, by and large, volunteering their time, so telling them that
they can or can't do something generally doesn't work - you have to do
something pretty bad and egregrious before your contributions are no longer
accepted.  Which, of course, means that in theory standards are great,
but in practice, they won't always work.

Now, all that being said, this is free software, and you have a chance to
affect all of this.  Break out your favorite editor and start coding.
Just as you can't affect what others want to spend their time doing, you
have that same luxury, and if you can find an intelligent way to make KDE
and GNOME interoperate better, I think we'll be all ears.  I can't speak
for the GNOME people of course.

Of course, there is one caveat that makes things difficult.  Try to work
within the KDE libraries.  We really don't want to use gconf (as I just
reported on in kde-traffic) or gtk, etc.

Thanks for your interest in KDE and in improving the project.  We look
forward to seeing your contributions. :)

--Russell