Re: KDE/Gnome : suggestion for easy peace pipe

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Alexander Kirillov wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 21, 2000 at 04:10:11AM +1100, David T. Bath wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > While we are discussing KDE/Gnome peace talks, I tried to think
> > of a suitably non-religious, relatively easy way to get some
> > "points on the board" for KDE and Gnome, showing the user communities
> > (whether they lean one way, the other, are ambidextrous, or are
> > trogs wanting both KDE and Gnome to fail) that there is progress.
> > 
> > Consider the KDE and Gnome documentation tools:
> > 	Both look at man pages
> > 	Both look at info pages
> > 	Both look at their "own" specific format.
> > 
> > Wouldn't it be nice if the gnome-help-browser could search and
> > display KDE documentation, and vice-versa?
> 
> Actually there is some work in this direction - there is a discussion
> of common "metadata" information used by GNOME, KDE, LDP,
> etc. documentation so that a help browser can search and display all
> of these documents. Dan Mueth can tell you more.

Sasha is right on here.  Laszlo (Sun/GNOME), Eric Bischoff (KDE docs), I
(GNOME docs), and others have been working on a metadata system which we
plan to share between KDE, GNOME, and other projects.  It will essentially
be an electronic card catalog for docs, allowing the help browser to
determine what docs are on your system and various information about them
(title, language, subject, etc.), search them, sort them, etc.  We plan to
extend this onto servers to allow one to view and search remote
documentation.  As a basis, we are using XML and Metalab's OMF metadata
system which a subset of Dublin Core, so we have our quota of standards.  

Thanks to good collaboration between Dave Mason (GNOME) and Eric (KDE),
KDE and GNOME both use DocBook for docs.  There are subtle differences due
to a couple modifications to the standard DocBook (eg. the GDP has a
modified DTD to allow us to use PNG images) which we hope to fix in the
future.  In the past however, both projects converted to HTML for the
final shipped docs, so the docs are compatible with the other project.  
You can view most of one project's docs in the other project's browser
right now. (It would take some more work to select "kde-help-browser" in
the control center, since the browsers don't know where the other
project's docs are at.)  There are some things which can be improved, but
we are trying to progress along similar paths and remain compatible.  The
metadata system above should help.

Another documentation-related project we are working on with KDE is
creating a DocBook editor based on the existing Conglomerate base.  As you
can imagine, this is a tough job since GNOME and KDE each use different
languages, widget sets, XML libraries, etc.  Right now we are still
discussing these issues and trying to figure out how we can work together
while still creating a product which both GNOME and KDE will be happy
with.  Since this has a very high flame-fest potential, this discussion
has been through private email so far.

There are other opportunities to collaborate too such as working on common
documents (a glossary, general Linux docs), translation tools, etc.

So in the documentation and translation areas, there are great potentials
for collaboration.  I'm not sure if you really meant to get into all these
details, but I thought I would show that we (doc and i18n folks) realize
the benefit of collaborating between projects and have been trying to do
so.

I agree with David that it would be a nice idea to try to emphasize these
collaborations to the public to try to burry the supposed "KDE/GNOME war".  
The GF can help here, as can the comments of individual GNOME users and
developers.

<challenge>
It would be a good start if GNOME users and developers could congratulate
KDE when they launch their KDE League instead of criticizing them.
</challenge>

I'll leave that as a challenge to all the GNOME people reading this post.

Dan