KDE & Gnome Usability Engineers Interviewed

Gentu writes "After the recent flamewar between the KDE and Gnome user camps, OSNews brings together the most influencial KDE and Gnome usability engineers to talk about how they will be able to overcome a number of obstacles in order to 'unify' KDE and Gnome in ways that could bring to the Unix desktop an easy to use, integrated and fully interoperated DE to better compete with the commercial alternatives. Waldo from SuSE and Havoc from Red Hat are taking part to the interview, and also Aaron, the head of KDE's usability."

Comments

Interoperability is king

[nitehorse]

There's a relatively large thread going on in the kde-core-devel mailinglist about such interoperability efforts that you guys might be interested in, too... check out this thread for the whole story.

The short version is - arts, the KDE sound daemon, uses glib code internally, but the maintainer wanted to move the glib code to rely on an externally-installed glib (instead of maintaining a copy of glib in the arts distribution). Lots of developer confusion over this has ensued, but a lot of interesting discussion has also resulted. Check it out.

Re:Interoperability is king

[nitehorse]

I think that a lot of the problem with GObject is (in most KDE developers' minds) is that we feel it's a hack for C to help make OO programming available, where OO is much more readily available in other languages.

The OO paradigm wasn't around when C was designed, and C certainly is an awkward language to use OO in.

It's the difference between saying:

QPushButton *button = new QPushButton("Hello, world!");

and:

GtkButton *button = gtk_button_new_with_label("Hello, World!");

In one case, you have clearly defined language-level constructs and rules about what happens when you use said constructs; using the 'new' keyword on any object means that the language will automatically call the constructor for the object in question.

So instead of having to write a x_button_new_with_specific_property function, you define a class with the properties, and the proper constructors (because C++ has rules about how constructors get called, instead of forcing the programmer to remember a name mapping for every _new function with every possible permutation of the _with_property names at the end).

I support GObject personally insofar as it is used for the language bindings, because programming GTK in ruby or python should be easy and fun and take full advantage of the OO properties of those languages; but for use in C? Thanks, but no thanks.