Re: KDE Interop [Was: D-BUS background]

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 04:55:27PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> Reading today's Slashdot comments, you can see that our desktop is
> falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE.  It is of course

Some of those commments didn't make any sense.  Some people were advocating
throwing away things we learned in usability testing some even questioned
the value of usability.

Most of these guys are very unix/linux centric and work in very in
that model.  Having gadzillion options works great for people like me but
try to supporting those to people who have no knowledge of computing is
a nightmare.  If we project forward when popularity of linux desktops
perhaps become mainstream I believe that those "features" will be
a liability.

> emotional component described before), would like to see more work be
> done on the Gnome desktop and less on replicating infrastructure. 

I think work is getting done perhaps too slowly for a lot of people
but it's happening.  GNOME has never looked sweeter, it's getting there
and it will continue to get there.

> Maybe ORBit can not be effectively used, but some people like Michael
> (who has a lot of experience in the area) rightly felt that d-bus was
> created and developed without the input that they could have provided,
> or without giving a chance to use an existing platform. 

I think the bone of contention is the hint that it might be used as a
replacement of Bonobo.  I don't think that will happen without a solid
discussion hopefully face to face.  Where I'm excited about DBUS is the fact
that it's a nice lightweight methodology of passing messages from say a
linux device driver to a listening application.  So detecting CDs or some
other type thing could be done without a lot of code.  

As for not getting any input, D-BUS has been around since November.  
Anybody is welcome to join the mailing list, contribute, and even
debate about the virtues of D-BUS. (hey it said so on the D-BUS 
page! :-)

> Getting Gnome on every desktop possible is a pretty good goal that
> people can identify with (I do). 

I agree here.

> This is not intended as a flame.  Hope the tone here is the right one.

Sounds non-inflmmatory to me.  I rather not have a flame war especially
if we start discussing /. threads which I for one do not believe is a 
basis for a grounded discussion anyways.