Re: KDE and Gnome shuld be closer.

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 21 Sep 1998, Kevin Forge wrote:
> 
> 1 : Cut and Paste : X dose most of the work and I have herd it's cool
> between 
> 	the Desktops
>

Either X or CORBA will do this, so it's cool.
 
> 2 : Drag and Drop : XDnD.  It's a done deal since XDnD is supported all
> the way
> 	by both teams ( and Troll Tech )
> 

Yep, good here.

> 3 : Corba : Still pretty much up in the air.  Most people don't even get
> what
> 	Corba dose completely but from what I grasp it's only used by the 
> 	file manager and Panel in Gnome and by the Office suite in KDE.
> 	They both use different implementations though.  At one time they both
> 	used Mico but Gnome has decided Mico has limitations they cannot live
> 	with.  Hopefully the solution they are building will still work
> together
> 	with the KDE/Mico setup ( I don't know enough about corba to say much
> 	on the likelihood of that ).
> 

In principle CORBA code is portable across ORBs, as long as you don't use
ORB-specific extensions. I imagine KDE will have a look at ORBit though,
once it has C++ bindings. 

CORBA is young in both desktops, I think.

> 4 : Themes : KDE supports Themes.  Gnome supports Themes.  They both
> however let
> 	you modify different things to different levels.  Right now you can
> have
> 	all the Widgets in all you Gnome apps turned into a nice wood grain
> 	or a gaudy purple with yellow dots.  I only ask that the config tools 
> 	inter operate.  I.e. Those few items that both desktops let you
> configure 
> 	you should be able to set using either of the tools.  What this means
> 	is that if you change your color scheme in Gnome, any KDe apps you have 
> 	will also adopt the same colors.  Also the apps need to gracefully 
> 	ignore those settings they do not allow ( The widget pics mentioned 
> 	above ).
> 

Shared config options are not yet supported. It could be done with CORBA
too though, or by simple agreement on conventions. I'm not sure themes in
particular share enough semantics, however.

> 5 : Document formats.  Well for the most part they do not seam to be
> inventing
> 	any proprietary formats ( how proprietary can something be when 
> 	everybody has access to the source code ? ).  XML, TEX, HTML etc...
> 

Worst case: the K and G apps each have an import filter for the other. No
big deal. 

> 6 : Help files.  This is a part of the Doc format situation.  Basically
> the 
> 	user with a KDE desktop should not be in anyway impaired from reading 
> 	the Gnome Docs with the KDE reader.  I think both are using basic 
> 	HTML or the SGML subset ( I may be wrong )
>

We're all using standard formats that don't even require Gnome or KDE, I
think.
 
> 7 : Config files.  What confuses people is not that there is a text file
> to 
> 	edit when you want to get down and dirty.  The confusion comes from
> 	the ~/.*rc files or whatever using vastly different syntax from 
> 	one app to the next.
> 

I don't think either desktop requires text file editing.

> 8 : Look and Feel.  It doesn't matter so much how each desktop looks. 
> What 
> 	is worrying is if the apps use vastly different keystrokes.  I.e. 
> 	ctrl+C is as good a cut command as any so lets all use that 
> 	( hypothetical example since ctrl+C is actually used for copy :).  
> 	This also ties into the config wish above in that KDE 1.1 ( in CVS )
> 	has a tool for	setting the shortcut keys for most everything.  This 
> 	is also configurable in Gnome so how about both tools affecting the 
> 	other ?
> 

Same shared config file problem. Could do this with CORBA; have a "key
bindings config server" of some kind. Assuming it's possible to set
bindings above the application level. 

> 9 : Window Managers.  KDE comes with KWM and has a spec for writing KDE 
> 	compliant WMs.  Gnome doesn't care much about what WM you use but it
> 	also has a spec that WMs must fit to reap max benefits.  At my last 
> 	count there were 2 KDE WMs and 4 Gnome WMs.  1 of those is BOTH KDE
> 	and Gnome compliant.  Why not move more that way ?
> 

I don't know what's going on here. If the WM extensions overlap, it would
make sense to merge them.

Havoc