Re: Integrating a Qt application with both desktops

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay gnu org> writes:
> 
> And this only goes some of the way to solving the problem. This assumes
> that people only ever run KDE or GNOME. This is silly. The application
> should use whatever settings the current active desktop environment use -
> i.e., you can select "KDE Session" from [kg]dm and run the app, help runs
> in KDE's browser, go back and do the same with "GNOME Session" and
> magically, GNOME's browser works. Something needs to be aware of the
> current setup. Shared config files for MIME types probably won't work all
> that well, as users will get their KDE help browser popping up in GNOME
> sessions and vice versa..
> 

I think that's an oversimplification; for the vast majority of cases,
you want a single preferred app for your file type, you don't want the
app changing according to desktop. 

If you're doing real work, then you learn the keybindings etc. for an
app, and are reluctant to ever change apps. People don't want the app
that "matches" their desktop, they want the app that they are used to
using.

e.g. you definitely want to get the same word processor you're used
to, regardless of current desktop.

The help browser is sort of an edge case; if you say "switch desktops"
then maybe the help browser is considered part of the desktop, like
the panel and window manager.

One simple solution is to change the default applications for MIME
types when you switch desktops, but never override a setting the user
has explicitly made. That would then handle the help browser case
pretty well; if I've never explicitly modified my help browser I get
the one for the current desktop, if I've changed it to Mozilla then I
always get Mozilla.

Anyway, however we go on that the thing users _really_ don't care
about is what toolkit and API was used to write the app. So no
user-visible behavior should be explicable by the phrase "that's a GTK
app" or "that's a Qt app." We have a long way to go on that.

Havoc