Re: Why GTK+ vs. GNOME?

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Magnus Wirström (magnus@www.bip.net) wrote at 16:29 on 12/08/00:
> On Fri, 11 Aug 2000 18:14:58 +0300 you wrote:
> 
>  > 
>  > * Franck Martin (Franck@sopac.org) wrote at 18:02 on 11/08/00:
>  > > 2)Some of the gnome libraries are related to display things on the screen,
>  > > which gives applications a nice look. I think this part should be in GTK
>  > > while drag and drop, bonobo,.. should stay in gnome. I tried to convert a
>  > > gnome application created with glade to a gtk strict application. And I
>  > > found out that I had to remove half of the Gnome GUI (buttons, menus,...) to
>  > > recreate it manualy in GTK. I think this is the problem: the gnomeUI library
>  > > should be a GTK library.
>  > 
>  > What exactly would the point of this be? You might as well just 'scrub'
>  > gnome-libs and fold it into Gtk+? It does not make sense to 'move everything
>  > into Gtk+' because then Gtk+ will become 'bloated'. 
>  > 
>  > How come I've never heard of people in the KDE group advocating moving widgets
>  > into Qt?
>  > 
>  > GNOME is here to provide a consistent interface/desktop to *nix users. Gtk+ is
>  > a cross-platform graphics toolkit. These are two largely different goals. 
>  > 
>  > Also - the fact of the matter is, the Gtk+ maintainers do not want to move all
>  > the GNOME 'widgets' into Gtk+ because it will be maintenance nightmare for them.
>  > 
>  > In the future though (GNOME 2.0), the number of 'dependencies' for gnome-libs
>  > will disappear. For example you won't need esd/audiofile (hopefully),
>  > gdk-pixbuf is in Gtk+ and will be replacing all imlib usage. You will only
>  > need very few additional packages to be able to compile gnome-libs (possible
>  > bonobo, possible gnome-vfs, etc.)
>  >  
>  > > 3)KDE runs on Windows, which is why people think about KDE. You then reach
>  > > 95% of the market. wxWindows is following the same principle it allows to
>  > > code for Gnome and Windows. So Why not have this possibility directly in
>  > > Gnome... I'm curious to see how StarOffice will be ported to gtk/gnome and
>  > > still run on windows, OS/2 and MacOS...
>  > 
>  > Porting GNOME to windows is not something the core GNOME hackers want to work
>  > on. They are just trying to provide a good consistent interface for the *nix
>  > people. GNOME's goal is not to 'run on windows'. GNOME's goal is to make *nix
>  > so easy to use that people will convert from Windows. 
>  > 
>  > The plain fact of the matter is, nobody has sat down to port GNOME to windows. A
>  > lot of the infrastructure for that is there, but it has not grabbed anybody's
>  > interest. Gtk+ has been ported to win32, libxml has been ported to win32,
>  > There might be ORBit for win32 (if there isn't you can just use another ORB).
>  > It is true that probably not /ALL/ of the infrastructure has been ported, but
>  > you can't just 'expect everything Unix' to work on windows without some work.
>  > 
>  > If _YOU_ want GNOME to run on Windows. _YOU_ need to take the initiative
>  > 
>  >  
> Well... I am a new programmer to *NIX and to GNOME and I just wanted to
> say that I like the GNOMEUI libs as they are and infact I would like to
> see more libs like that and making GNOME a little bit less dependent of
> gtk (if that is possible, I have not yet learned what gtk roll is in
> GNOME, but I have this feeling that it is a huge one) anyway... I vote
> for it to stay as it is ! It is so much nicer to work with than Windows!
> But still I have only worked and used GNOME for olny a couple of months
> so I have not really any experience of it!

There's no way in hell that GNOME will not depend on Gtk+ :)

And just so you know - when there is a GtkFileSelector and a GnomeFileSelector
- usually what happens is that GnomeFileSelector sub-classes the
  GtkFileSelector as part of the GtkObject (from my understanding). So it is
not duplication of code/duplication of effort. What happens is that we
possible override a few functions/signals/whatever to make it look better and
act better within the GNOME desktop framework.

Consider Gtk+ to be the 'bare-minimum' and GNOME just builds on it.

Regards,
Ali