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

[Gleef <dzol virtual-yellow com>]

On Fri, 25 Dec 1998, Kevin Forge wrote:
> Gleef wrote:
> > Proper Corba apps should be friends, but my understanding is that both
> > Baboon and KOM make assumptions above and beyond the raw Corba spec,
> > making them trickier to integrate.  Mico and ORBit should talk to each
> > other fine though.
> 
> Tsk, Tsk, So neither set are proper Corba apps ?  Can they be "fixed" or 
> at least bindings written so that apps written to KOM will play nice
> with apps written to Baboon ?

I dunno, we've reached the frontier of my knowledge of the object model
for both projects.


> > What mechanism does KDE's control center use to switch languages?  Since
> > both are using gettext, I would think that works already.  Can you give
> > more detail to the problem you're having?
> 
> I am not having any problems.  I just haven't tried using Gnome apps
> ( the sight of all those libs on 2 different FTP sites scared me 
> speechless ).  Do they both respond to the same "switch to language X
> command ? 

Well, they should both respond to the same LANG environment variable that
gettext uses.  Assuming KDE's language switching command sets that, they
both will follow suit, along with any non-GNOME non-KDE gettext programs.

  
> > As I indicated, hardcoded keybindings won't work for a truly
> > internationalized program.  Find C-Z on a Greek keyboard.  While KDE might
> > have a more potent keybinding solution than its webpage implies, linking
> > to the webpage is not, in itself, a solution.
> 
> There is actually a Library that handles Key bindings.  If I understand 
> correctly ( And I may very likely be wrong :) You code your keybindings
> and then the translation to customized or foreign maps is done by this 
> lib.  That way the programer who knows only her language hasn't got to 
> worry about those people with different charsets or needs.

Excellent.  I plan to take a look at that library, and see how well it can
be ported to GNOMEland.  GNOME needs something like this, and if the
keybinding settings are both robust and cross-environment (that is, the
user selects the Foo keyboard in whichever environment, and gets the Foo
keybindings in both), all the better for both projects. :-)

-Gleef