Re: [gtk-list] Proposal for a new project

[Otto Hammersmith <otto redhat com>]

On Tue, May 13, 1997 at 07:42:55PM +0200, Espen S Johnsen wrote:
> Recently there has been a lot of discussion about KDE/Qt and the GPL
> on comp.os.linux.development.apps.  I won't say anything about that,
> but there is two reasons why I would never use or contribute to KDE:
> it is C++ only and uses a proprietary GUI toolkit (Qt).
> 
> Now that a very nice free GUI toolkit exists (you know which), I think
> the time is right for a new project: The General Desktop Environment,
> GDE for short.  Of course we should try to reuse as much code as
> possible from existing programs, and maybe from KDE.  I have also read
> some rumours about Red Hat rewriting their tools to use GTK.  If this
> is true, we could try to convince them to support GDE.  In any case, I
> know a lot of cool programs will be written with GTK as the toolkit.

I will say that we at Red Hat are very interested in GTK, and we'd
like to see it become a useful standard for Linux (and hopefully
others) development.

To that end, I can arrange web and ftp space, and possibly more
mailing lists, if need be.  I also have some free time I can devote to
administrative-type things.

Now my opinion on the whole thing... :)

I've seen plenty of net-projects die.. either from inactivity or from
flame-wars.  I'm especially wary about this one, since a lot of the
success of the Gimp (and equally GTK) has been the small centralized
development team.

I'd say the majority of the usefulness behind such a beast would be to
reduce duplication of effort... certainly not a pipeline for flamewars
over how something should be done or look or whatever.

So, I suppose, I want to know what everyone else on this list thinks
at this point.  Comments?

> If we start now, we may even catch up with the KDE project before they
> release their first official (non-beta) version.  One program which will
> be necessary is as small and fast documentation browser for HTML 2.0,
> info and man pages.

One thing, you need to be realistic.  KDE has been in the works for
about 9 months now... there really isn't much chance for us to catch
up that quickly, not that it's entirely impossible. :)

-- 
					-Otto.