Re: Working together

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

This is somewhat old email I'm replying to.  I've been away from my
Gnome email for a bit.

Julian> 1) Will KDE and GNOME apps be indistiguishable? Will cut and
Julian> paste work between K apps and G apps (for text, graphics,
Julian> audio, [files?], how about drag and drop, object linking and
Julian> embedding?

I certainly hope so.  For cut-and-paste and D&D I'd say the answer
will certainly be yes.

For object linking and embedding, it depends on whether we can all
agree on a design for the component framework.  I'm optimistic that
this will happen.

Julian> 2) Is anyone working on an OpenDoc style format? Both projects
Julian> seem to be looking into using CORBA but has it got further
Julian> than that? I seem to remember some comments about a document
Julian> format, but it's been pretty quiet recently.

As I understand it, OpenDoc is a framework and not a document format.
The format underlying OpenDoc parts is provided by a layer called
Bento.

This comes up periodically on the Gnome list, but to my knowledge no
one has seriously considered building something based on OpenDoc,
where "seriously" means "has started writing any sort of document or
code".  I imagine this is simply because Gnome is still fairly young,
and so it would be premature to do so.

Julian> 3) GNOME use GUILE as a flexible scripting language. Does KDE
Julian> have an equivilent or will they also support GUILE?

Sadly, I think this is a misrepresentation of the state of affairs in
the Gnome world.  People seem to be moving away from Guile... bummer.

It would probably take CORBA interfaces in Guile, plus major
extensions to the Gtk/Guile stubber, to resurrect Guile support at
this point.

Julian> 4) What about application features such as help file formats,
Julian> menu layout, draggable toolbars, themes, dialog box messages
Julian> and errors etc etc? Will these work the same way under KDE and
Julian> GNOME?

Don't know.

I'm certainly in favor of Gnome and KDE sharing a style guide.  But,
predictably, that doesn't mean that Gnome should just adopt KDE's
wholesale.  Instead decisions must be made in some open way, e.g. on
this list.  Disclaimer: I haven't read KDE's style guide.  If there
are several reasonable and as-yet-unspecified ways of doing something,
I would certainly recommend following KDE, just to reduce divergence.


There's another layer in here which you didn't mention: CORBA-based
services.  This is like the component layer, but doesn't involve
embedding.  The canonical example here is the interface to something
like an address book.  Hopefully the interface code here can be shared
as well.

Tom