On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 14:12, Jason Keirstead wrote:

> 
> Why does it always seem like people want to make KDE use Gnome technologies 
> (often not as far developed as their KDE counterparts) in order to improve 
> compatability?

I think there are mainly three reasons - and none of them is about
quality or C++.

1) KDE libs are based on Qt and Qt is under GPL and not LGPL. A lot of
people think that's not a good choice for a basic library to be used by
everyone. I know you will tell me that there are workarounds for that,
but still ... for lots of people this is important. Not all "Open
Source" licenses are GPL compatible. And for some reason ALL other basic
libraries are LGPL (or even more libaral) licensed. Qt is really the
only basic library which is strictly under GPL. (Kernel and glibc are
GPL but have linking exceptions.)

2) Qt is one big block including GUI stuff (i have heard that is going
to be changed - QtCore - and that's definitely good news)
 
3) Gnome libraries are modular from design. They almost seem to be
designed with having the "common" usage in mind. Usually there is no GUI
stuff inside them. KDE libraries traditionally seem to be more designed
to serve a single desktop and come as one big block - the core for the
KDE desktop. The frontend of KIO has GUI stuff inside for instance.
Gnome-VFS doesn't.

I hope that Trolltech will change the license of the core part of QT to
LGPL one day. That would completely change the situation.

> 
> Why doesn't Gnome implement the KIO Slave IPC protocol? After all, as I 
> understand it, a KIOSlave is a process, Gnome apps wouldn't have to link 
> against a KDE library to makde use of existing KDE IO slaves already on the 
> system. And there are far more KIO slaves than GVFS ones.
> 

I think using KIOSlave code inside Gnome-VFS is definitely a good idea.
But i would not use them as they are, but rather write a C++ porting
layer on top of the Gnome-VFS modules concept which almost acts like the
SlaveBase class, but without Qt stuff inside. Porting them should be
possible, because the Qt bindings of io-slaves are not very strong.

> For that matter, why not explore making kio_fuse more robust and shipping it 
> with default distros, then *any* app, even a console one, can make use of all 
> the KIO slaves.

For good arguments against FUSE look at this message:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-vfs-list/2004-December/msg00061.html
It makes sense to me.

regards,

Norbert