On April 27, 2003 05:32 pm, Francois Gouget wrote:
Bah, I don't really care. Maybe because I use neither Gnome nor KDE. I see your point but I can't help but think that it's a bit of a stretch to say Trolltech could become another monopoly when there is a GPL implementation available, which is why I said the above.
I really don't understand you. It seems to me obviously clear that a GPLed platform is as useful as a GPLed Wine. This is not something minor, and it's no stretch -- the Trolls would have the monopoly over all commercial apps, which is where the money is. You may not use either, but that's no solution. People will have to choose one or the other, they can't go back to Xaw or Motif.
Now if you think WIDE is portable, tell us how.
Well, we do have Winelib working on non-i386 platforms, don't we? But bottom line, people worried about portability should program to the Gnome/Gtk API, I haven't suggested for a moment we drop Gtk and code everything to the Win32 API. For people like the emule guys that like to code to the Win32 API, they can continue to do so if they so wish.
So the situation will remain the same: we will haev KDE applications and WIDE applications and they will not be interoperable. I.e. it won't be possible to insert an Excel spreadsheet in a KWord document.
No, it will be better: you will be able to have deep integration between Win32 apps and Gnome apps, no small feat.
Does that include interoperability with OLE/COM/DCOM or just the look and feel integration?
Well, the OLE/COM/DCOM bit is the interesting one, the look and feel is simple and has other solutions, as we discussed.
I believe where we differ is on the method:
- I think we should work on Wine to make that possible (though there may be some work to do in Gnome and KDE).
For sure. But this will work for things like L&F. The difficult things aren't even considered by anyone at this point. So no, we are quite in violent agreement here.
- You think that it is mostly Gnome that must be modified to use the Wine APIs and you are ready to drop/ignore KDE. I believe you also proposed to replace Nautilus/Konqueror with Explorer, and to develop a new window manager.
No, I'm not dropping/ignoring KDE. It's just that right now we're talking about some deep integration issues that no one even considered before. Right now, integration is used to describe L&F. It's fairly clear we need to be able to integrate with things like BlueCurve so Wine integrates as much as possible in both Gnome and KDE.
Wide doesn't change that. In fact, being based on Wine, it will implicitly benefit from all the integration work we do on the Wine side. But at that point, people will ask: what is the difference between Wide, and just Wine running in Gnome? And it's a good question. Part of the answer is that Wide may choose to use Wine's OLE implementation to integrate Bonobo/Win32/OpenOffice apps. But that's really wishfull thinking, I'm not even sure that's at all possible.
The real answer is that Wide is just like Gnome, but with a different set of mentalities. Instead of picking the default apps only based on religious things like 'is it using Gtk?', I propose we choose the default apps from the set of all Gnome and free Win32 apps (and any other platform that integrates nicely). I am sorry I can't include KDE here as well, but it's because their platform is not free enough, not because I don't like the Qt framework. If tomorrow we have a LGPL Qt implementation, they would be added to the pool of possible apps.
This should answer your Nautilus/Konqueror/Explorer. I have to religious affiliation to Nautilus or Konqueror. If the ReactOS people build a better (and free) browser, it goes in as the default browser. Apps should compete on features and user experience, not on irrelevant implementation details.