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

[Francois Gouget]

I apologize if I'm misinterpreting what you said. It came across that
way to me. Maybe it's just I misunderstood you or that your words were
not true to your thoughts.


On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
[...]
> So, can someone please tell me a *single* advantage of having KDE & QT
> as the GUI platform for Linux vs. having WIDE?

I mentioned many but you seem to be conveniently ignoring them.

At the same time you dismiss out of hand solutions that are being worked
on, exist and are usable now, just because they are not perfect.  At the
same time you push a solution which does not exist, claim it will solve
all problems when it seems to me it will just run into exactly the same
issues you complain about for the other while adding new issues of its
own.

For instance, if we just take the Look and Feel issue. You diss Gnome
an KDE for not having a common configuration for their look and feel.

 * As far as I can tell WIDE would not have a configurable look and feel
at all because Wine does not have that support. Sure that support can be
added but that's replacing something that works (themes in Gnome and
KDE) even if not perfect (not integrated) with something that does not
exist (themes in Wine).
 * you propose to use GTK-Wimp to integrate the Gnome look and feel with
the Wide themes. That's a good idea. But you don't propose anything to
integrate the KDE look and feel with the Wide look and feel. So either
KDE applications will still have a different look and feel from Wide
applications, or more development will be necessary. At this point I
have to wonder whether this is less work than integrating the Gnome and
KDE theme configuration, or use a trick ala Blue Curve, and whether the
method you propose is going to be really superior.
 * you want all applications to have the same look and feel and I
definitely agree with that goal. You claim Wide makes it possible but
you don't address the case of applications that are not based on Gnome
or KDE: gkrellm, emacs, Xaw-based applications, etc. Now to be fair I
think there is nothing we can do for these applications except find
replacements for them (or live with them as they are).

In my view, one thing that has plagged the Unix desktop is the
proliferation of GUI toolkits and desktop environments/window managers.
Fortunately in the past few years most development appears to have
coalesced on two environments, Gnome and KDE. But you are essentially
proposing to add yet another toolkit/desktop environment and IMO this
requires having very strong arguments showing the existing stuff
*cannot* be fixed and that the new stuff will not suffer the same issues
and will be significantly superior.

(yes I feel the same way whenever someone says we need yet another
window manager, text editor, email client, web browser, file manager,
replacement for X, Linux distribution, etc.)



[...]
>   -- bad: QT, can you spell non-free?

According to my Debian files, QT is dual licensed under the QPL and GPL:

   Qt 2.2 and later is dual licensed under the QPL and the GPL
   Please refer to /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL for complete GPL license.

So this does not seem to be a problem. Or did it change back with 3.0?



> 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'.

I hope you do not ascribe that argument to me.


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                     Linux: the choice of a GNU generation