Interview with David Faure of Mandrake & KDE

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting interview with David Faure, the french KDE developer who works for Mandrake Software. His code can be found on Konqueror, KFM, KWord and he is also the main bug hunter for KDE. David talks about KDE 3's enhancements and speed improvements, the future of KWord, the debugging tools under Linux, and even Gnome2, .NET, MacOSX and Mozilla."

Comments

fuck off gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah KDE 3 owns it is 20000 far ahead than GNOME 2 will ever be.

somehow KDE will always be.

GNOME developers are arrogant assholes.

Re:fuck off gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but even though gnomes a fucked up piece of DOG SHIT theres lots of Good GTK apps that don't need gnomes shit. Like mozilla, gimp and the kick ass *drake setup tools :),

Ashamed Mandrake User

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like mandrake, but God, why did the French have to make it? I'm so ashamed.

Re:Eugenia is having bandwidth issues...

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHH SLASHDOT DOESN"T WORK LIKE THAT U DUMB NIGGER JEW WHORE.

MORE COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS

Interview with Mandrake's & KDE's David Faure

By Eugenia Loli-Queru - Posted on 2002-02-25 17:32:22
in OSNews [http://www.osnews.com/]

David Faure [http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~david/] is a well known developer in the KDE & Linux community. His work can be found in KFM, Konqueror source code and he recently also picked up KOffice's KWord [http://www.koffice.org] development. David is also one of the people who have commited in bug squashing under KDE, especially after he got hired by Mandrake Software. Read more for our interview with David regarding Konqueror, KDE object prelinking, Gnome and much more.

1. KDE 3 comes out soon. What is the best new advancement/feature found in KDE 3 in your opinion?

David Faure: I think the most important improvement in KDE3 is the greatly improved Javascript and DHTML support in Konqueror. I'm not only saying this because I took part in the work on Javascript, but also because this was said to be the most important drawback of Konqueror in KDE 2 by many users. The IMAP support in KMail comes to mind too, as an important new feature, for those using IMAP. KDE 3 is not a big architectural change (such as KDE 2.0 was), it is simply a continuation in the work on all applications, adding the features that the user requested, as well as improving speed and stability.

2. Are the KDE people going to do something for the C++ loader problem in Linux, which results on slow KDE loading times? Is the object prelinked method 'safe', or work is being done to the loader itself, to add the needed functionality?

David Faure: You said it all ;)
The linker has indeed been identified as a cause for slowdown when starting C++ applications. Work is being done in that area, though not by the KDE developers themselves. The objprelink method does not appear to be stable enough to work around this problem, it is known to be the reason for crashes in the Javascript engine and in KMail. I'm not aware of the details, but it seems objprelink is rather a "hack", i.e. a quick change that doesn't address the whole issue. On the other hand, rumours have it that the gcc/ld developers are working on prelinking, which is something different, cleaner, faster, and stable.

3. Some people call you the "KDE Bug Crasher". Windows enjoy the presense of some very advanced development tools, like the new VS.NET debugger or Purify/Quantify by Rational. How the Linux developers are coping when they are in need to debug big projects like KDE or Gnome or Star Office? What tools do you use and how they compare to the Windows equivelant?

David Faure: Those calling me that never told me :) Let's talk about the development tools then. In addition to the obvious compiler, debugger and text editor, Linux comes with pretty decent development tools such as XEmacs, vim, and kdevelop. On the subject of XEmacs, the KDE developers have been developing some macros (lisp code) that help developing C++ with it, this is available in kdesdk/scripts. For advanced debugging such as memory leaks, kmtrace (in kdesdk) seems to do a good job too. What was missing for a long time was a memory debugger, to detect use of uninitialized or deleted memory etc., such as Purify provides. This is now available thanks to Julian Seward, who developed a GPL tool call valgrind [http://devel-home.kde.org/~sewardj/].

Although still under development, this tool allows to find many non-obvious bugs in the code. But for the most common types of bugs (wrong code paths etc.) kdDebug() (the equivalent of printf or cout) and gdb do the job quite well ;)

4. What do you think about .NET the Framework? Have you had a look to this new API yet? What are your thoughts of dotGNU and Ximian's Mono?

David Faure: From what I've seen - I admit I haven't looked very much into the API though -, .NET is basically Microsoft's reinvention of Java, with the possibility for any object-oriented la

Re:linux on the desktop is too slow

[be-fan]

Hmm, on my 300MHz/256MB machine (my 1.5 GHz Athlon is in the mail ;) Galeon running under IceWM absolutely crawls, while Windows 2000 + IE6 absolutely flies. Opening a new window in Galeon takes several seconds while a new IE window opens instantaneously. Surfing with dozens of windows open at the same time is absolute hell. There is no "may" about it. Speed-wise, GNOME and KDE are both pieces of shit.