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Common Interfaces for Gnome and KDE Released
An anonymous reader writes "Today OSDL and freedesktop.org announced the release of Portland 1.0, a set of common interfaces for GNOME and KDE. From the article: 'Specifically, these tools make installing and uninstalling menus, icons, and icon-resources easier for developers. They also can obtain the system's settings on how to handle different file types, and program access to email, the root account, preferred applications, and the screensaver. There's nothing new in this kind of functionality. What is new is that developers can use these regardless of which desktop environment -- KDE or GNOME -- they're targeting.'"
If common interfaces are going to be adopted by KDE and GNOME, at the same time some GNOME- or KDE-specific libs should be abandoned.
That's right. It's pointless to have two different sets of libraries. Since the KDE libraries are clearly far superior to the GNOME ones, the KDE ones should be adopted and GNOME-libs abandoned.
GNOME advocate: Hey! The GNOME ones are better! Let's abandon the KDE libs instead!
[argument ensues]
That, in a nutshell, is why we have both. As long as there's people willing to work on them, and people who want to keep using them, both sets are going to exist. There's no know-nothing manager with the power to force people to abandon anything here in the OSS world.