Re: Thoughts about Kde, Gnome, and Staying Neutral (Was gtk-term widget?)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Matthew <matthew@mattshouse.com> writes: 
> > Anyway, no conspiracy here folks, look at the facts of the code in the
> > development version of GTK, read your gtk-devel-list archives...
> 
> Now, you have to admit something here.  You've stated that Gtk1.4
> requires "a half-dozen image-loader libraries plus Pango".  Does
> that sound familiar to anyone else?  I'm not bitching anymore, as my
> problem was with a weak Gtk and not with a strong Gnome.  I can now
> stay politically centered and have my cool widgets.  BUT!  It would
> appear that Gtk and Gnome are merging.
>

If you define merging as GTK matching the good features from gnome-libs,
then sure, of course.
 
> The Point (tm):
> The perfect example of my point is a project near and dear to my heart: The
> Gnome-db project.  I'm a database developer, and the Gnome-db project is all
> about database access.  They had the opportunity to make the world a better
> place.  They didn't.  They're making it worse.  They are GNOME-db, which means
> that the Kde people will not embrace them.  Quite the contrary, Kde will now
> have to unleash kde-db, a similar yet incompatible API.  Gnome-db would have
> been much better off being Gtk-db, or even X-db and leaving Gnome to provide the
> environment.  There is absolutely no reason why their custom widgets
> and APIs have to tie into Gnome.  
> 

I 100% agree that we should have a non-widget-set-specific database
access library, and we do have many non-widget-set-specific libraries
such as Pango, GConf, and ORBit. The gnome-db maintainers didn't
agree, but this doesn't reflect what many would like to see.

(The widgets do have to be widget set specific; this is just not
technically avoidable, at least until we have a
not-widget-set-specific control embedding library.)

Havoc