Support for pkgconfig

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On 15 Apr 2003, Alexandre Julliard wrote:

> I strongly disagree. The Win32 API may not be so bad in the abstract
> (though I'd dispute that too), but it's a very poor choice for a Unix
> toolkit. It exposes way too many low-level details that don't have an
> equivalent on Unix. If you want a cross platform toolkit you should
> use a higher level one that abstracts a lot more of the platform
> details; and if you don't care about other platforms then you should
> use a Unix native toolkit. I don't think we would be doing anybody a
> favor by encouraging the use of Wine for new Linux developments.

Absolutely -- nobody these days write apps directly in the Win32 API.
People do use a higher level toolkit such as MFC, QT, GTK, etc.
Yeah, I agree, the Win32 API exposes stuff that's hard to implement
on Unix. But stop for a second and think at the following ideal
scenario:
	- all QT versions were free (and LGPL)
	- GTK had a proper Win32 port, where they would not reimplement
	  the widgets, but use the native ones like QT does
	- we had a stable Wine 1.0 :)

Now, Linux apps use either QT/KDE, GTK/GNOME, or wxWindows as a toolkit.
If things are done right, we would have binary compatibility for the
toolkit backends, so that one can choose either the GTK/Wine or GTK/X11
backend at runtime.

These cross platform toolkits are hiding all these low level things that
are hard to implement, so we don't have that problem. But we would have
a unified platform that would be quite cool.

I don't think we're that far off. QT has a Win32 backend, it's doable,
the only problem is that it's not free. GTK should be portable to Win32,
and wxWindows already has a working Wine backend. Bonobo should easily
mix with OLE given it's development history.

What you get:
  -- Linux apps using their toolkit of choice. None of the silliness
     we have now where you have to choose one or the other almost
     like they are different platforms (there is hope with BlueCurve)
  -- Iteroperability across the board, including _native_ Windows
     apps!
  -- a LOT of good apps, free and comercial. Look at SF which are
     the most popular apps. Windows apps!
  -- a lot less duplication of efforts, etc, etc.

Yes, there are problems, it will not be 100% pretty, but what is? In
fact, all things too pretty tend to fail (I think Python is a lot
prettier than Perl, but Perl is doing so much better).

And I think a better name would be WIDE for:
  -- WIne Desktop Environment
  -- WIDEly Integrated Desktop Environment
  -- Wide Is a Desktop Environment
  -- WIld Desktop Environment
:)))

-- 
Dimi.