Wine, WIDE & Unix (was: Support for pkgconfig)

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On April 19, 2003 05:44 pm, Francois Gouget wrote:
> So I would rather put efforts into making sure Gtk, Gnome, KDE and QT
> are suitable solutions.

Really? Do people think that KDE & QT would be a more suitable solution?
Do *anyone* here think that KDE & QT are a better alternative then WIDE
for Linux as a _platform_?!? Newsflash: QT is GLPed. KDE depends on QT.
If you want to develop non-GPL apps on Unix using KDE/QT, you have to pay
thousands of dollars to Troll Tech for each developer. Is this the _free_
platform we want to build? You can develop apps for free on Windows 
(see MinGW, Borland, OpenWatcom), or for a small price buy MSVC, yet 
you'll have to pay through the nose on our free OS! Isn't that fantastic? 
And the best part is that we give the Trolls complete monopoly, whereas 
they can do what they want to the price in the future. We trade the 
(very little) control that MS has over Win32, with the big one that Trolls
have over QT. Splendid!

So, can someone please tell me a *single* advantage of having KDE & QT
as the GUI platform for Linux vs. having WIDE?

I have waited with this message a week to calm down, but I didn't :) so
I have to say what I have to say.

You guys rave about the big, bad, bloated, ugly Win32 messing up the nice 
Unix GUI API. WTH are you guys talking about? There's no traditional Unix 
GUI API! You want bad, bloated, and ugly? Fine:
   -- ugly: Xaw, what can I say?
   -- bloated: Motif, it's good it's dead.
   -- bad: QT, can you spell non-free?

So the _only_ viable Unix GUI API is GTK/GNOME. But version 2 of that API
came out only a year ago, and Evolution is not even ported to it! Do you
consider that traditional? It's so new it's not even funny. And maybe
that's fine, but the problem is that they lost steam: at the moment it
seems that most development is done by RedHat, Ximian, and Sun. And it's
going slow. The two platforms (GNOME and KDE) seem to diverge more and
more, and if you look asymptotically, do you see a bright, integrated
future?

I don't think that WIDE is the greatest idea since slice bread. It's just
something I thought of as a possibility during the discussion, and I threw
it in there as a way to show there are other ways of looking at Wine.
But I also don't think it's such a bad idea either. And I really don't
understand the irrational fear (oh, it comes from MS, it *must* be evil),
and the overly emotional and unsupportable defense of 'Unix API'.

-- 
Dimi.