From kde-core-devel  Wed Jan 23 09:18:24 2002
From: Matthias Ettrich <ettrich () trolltech ! com>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 09:18:24 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: Qt-only KDE applications
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=101177768128924

On Tuesday 22 January 2002 20:56, ian geiser wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Rik Hemsley wrote:
> > #if Matthias Ettrich
> >
> > > One suggestion was to go cross-platform with parts of KDE and to
> > > promote KDE as cross-platform API as well.
> > >
> > > There's another solution, which I'd like to promote here.
> >
> > I'd prefer to make KDE work cross-platform. Sure, there is quite a bit
> > of work involved, but it is feasible.
>
> I have often wondered about this approach but due to the fact that the
> kde2 cygwin guys have had so many problems i have never thought it
> feasable.
>
> What are the exact issues involved here?  dopening afaik is a little more
> complicated on Win32 and MacOSX, and there are the obvious X dependancies.
>
> I have to admit I am not very educated on what in deep in KDE libs that is
> not portable to Win32 so someone else would have to speak on that behalf.


It's not only portability that is the issue here. Some of the KDE features I 
was talking about simply don't make a lot of sense on a MS-Windows desktop. 

Take the file dialog, windows users already have one. Or the printing system. 
Or the standardized icons. Or the webbrowser. Or the desktop bus (DCOP). Even 
kconfig does not make much sense if the OS offers a registry (hence the 
simpler QSettings).

If we talk about kdeui, XML-GUI, KAction and alike, yes, that's most certainly 
portable.

To me, KDE's goal was and should be to make Unix the greatest desktop platform 
there is, not to improve the quality of commercial MS-Windows applications. 
However, I can accept there are different opinions on this ;)


Matthias