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

[Matthew <matthew mattshouse com>]

> > 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.

That's fine by me.  As long as RH, Suse, TL, Mandrake, and the rest keep
serving up Gtk by default, I'm a happy camper.

> > 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.

Hey, look at that.  We done agreed. :)

> (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.)

Well yeah.  But they don't have to be Gnome/Kde specific.  Gtk-db would be
wicked-bad.  They have a beautiful system.  Talk some sense into them.  If need
be "Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war".  I'll bet you get that a lot. :)

Matthew
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