Re: Food for thought: Why (and how) should KDE and Gnome unite?

[Adam Rotaru <arotaru cs sfu ca>]

On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, Peter Hawkins wrote:

> >   That's a tough question. Technically, I see a number of possibilities:
> >  1) since both are GPLed, an gorup can take both, and merge them. But it's
> >      very likely that such a group would consist of individuals who are
> >      already involved with one of the projects.
> > >2) gradually, more and more components become common (like font handling,
> >      screen savers, themes, internalization, etc.), and both projects
> >      focus on their strenghts.
> 
> This is where we should aim. A good starting point would  be a) those things you
> mention, and b) adding a thin infrastructure to allow KDE apps to run in the
> gnome environment happily, or gnome apps to run in the KDE environment happily.
> Perhaps what we need to be thinking of here is format, interface, and protocol
> compatibility. For example, why can't I run the kde file manager and drag and
> drop files onto my gnome panel? I should be able to. Why can't I open my gwp
> document in KWord? Can I embed a gnumeric  document in KWord? This is the sort of
> cross-desktop interoperability we need, and we need to talk to the kde folks
> about it in an enthusiastic way.
> So we need to basically wrap more functionality in standardised corba interfaces,
> so kde applets can run in the gnome panel, etc. etc., applications can embed...
> We need to get this all happening with the KDE folks as well.

  Wow! We are are on the same frequency here! If all this would things be
possible, that would be _very_ good!  What's missing is a standardized way
to handle these things.


> Common formats, common protocols, common interfaces. CORBA can help here, by
> providing interfaces behind which the application does not know whether it is
> talking to KDE or GNOME.
> 
> Simple things like drag and drop, panel applets, document embedding (that's not
> so simple, but I don't think either KDE or GNOME implement it yet, so it's
> probably a wonderful place to start).
  I don't know how simple is the drag-n-drop impelementation, but it's a
good start. Maybe common config files for mime types / apps is an easier
start:)
  
> Encourage more applications to use cross-toolkit programming methods (like
> netscape can. I know netscape has gone GTK+, but there's no reason why it
    Yes, and although I hope Netscape (Mozilla) will choose both to have
    both GTK+ and Qt versions, I have to realize that Netscape is
    important enough to influence the widget set popularity.

 cheers,
   Adam.