From kde-core-devel  Thu Sep 30 16:04:48 2004
From: Maks Orlovich <mo85 () cornell ! edu>
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 16:04:48 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: RFC: DBUS & KDE 4
Message-Id: <200409301204.48268.mo85 () cornell ! edu>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=109656030004288

> > Xlib is -old-. It's mature. It's stable. And it still has bugs.
> > Thankfully, people like Lubos are willing to fix them when they affect
> > us. Oh, and BTW, Qt is hardly a wrapper around X.
>
>  I guess you mean wrapper around Xlib, since Qt certainly is a "wrapper"
> around X. 

Well, I would disagree because I'd say it does more than just wrap X -- i.e. 
99% of Qt has nothing to do w/X per-se, it's just built on top of it 
(although I imagine you see a lot of the X-related bits). But that's a 
terminology question.  

> Xlib is just an implementation of the X protocol, saying Qt is a 
> wrapper around Xlib would be like saying KHTML is a wrapper around HTTP.

Yeah, that's sort of what I meant.

>  So you suggest we also create libkpng, libkX11, libkxml, libkart_lgpl
> etc.? Yes, relying on others sometimes sucks - e.g. right now with

Well, in this case we already have libDCOP. And yes, it relies on libICE 
presently, but I know it's not much effort to replace that (having done ~70% 
of the task in ~4 days, which also included a partial DCOP client lib and 
fixing a bug in libICE)

> [*] Just consider Aaron and his systray-over-DBUS. He knows DCOP, and he's
> been told by me a couple of times that DBUS is not the right thing for
> systray (let's ignore the question whether I'm right or not). And yet he
> wants to use DBUS. Now, what will people needing some kind of IPC do, who
> don't know about DCOP and are being told DBUS is the best thing since
> sliced bread?

See, that's partly why I am really uncomfortable about this stuff. It's 90% 
buzz, 10% technology. And buzz has rather circural nature: people get 
convinced that everyone will use X, so everyone ends up using X. 
D-BUS hardly excites me because I don't see anything particularly innovative 
in it (while DCOP's very existance was quite a radical idea, and the whole 
key/call causality tracing things is interesting). D-BUS seems mostly like 
DCOP rehashed by someone who didn't know DCOP and ICE very well, so ended up 
making some things worse w/some things better, while reproducing a lot of the 
really mundane stuff.