On 25 Apr 2003, Mike Hearn wrote:
Actually.... yes? :) They aren't really diverging in my eyes, this broken system tray I have sitting here taunting me is a visible reminder that we need to keep Wine up to date with the latest standards.
Yes, they become better integrated, but we're at the beginning of the road, and we still don't even get the easy stuff perfect: L&F, system tray, etc. I can see unifying most settings so we don't have to configure things twice, but we're far away, there seems to be little political will (especially on the KDE side). But what about OLE? KDE will never accept CORBA (for good reasons), while GNOME will not drop it. That's the big one: how do you integrate the apps more than making them just look the same?
I'm still not sure why you think we need one implementation to get integration, as opposed to one set of interfaces with several possible implementations.
It's mainly a misunderstanding, mea culpa. I am not suggesting the "one implementation" is the way to go, but it's a possiblity. I actually think a set of interfaces with different implementations is better in the long run, so I'm happy we have things like the freestandards.org, and Havoc seems to be doing a great job.
For WIDE, I would not reinvent everything around Win32, as the GNOME/KDE/OpenStep/Enlightment people did around their toolkits. I would get the best of breed apps from all environments, and try to integrate them: -- For L&F, having Wine adapt the L&F of the native environment is better, if that would be available, I'd use it. If not, I might compile GTK-Wimp agains Wine, until we get theaming in Wine. -- There are a bunch of free Win32 apps on SF which are very popular. I can choose some of those, like eMule, Mozilla/Win32, etc. I may use the ReactOS Explorer replacement instead of Nautilus, if they do a good job with it. -- I would compile wxWindows against it's Wine backend, simply because I think out widgets are better than the ones in GTK. -- I will try to have a Bonobo backend for Win32, so that GNOME apps could seemlessly link and embed Win32 apps. -- All libs in WIDE will be LGPL, so the platform is free for everybody.
I was not suggesting to replace read with ReadFile, or Unix pipes with Win32 pipes. Yes, about the same thing one can achieve on top of GNOME, by just tweaking Wine to integrate better with it. But the big problem with GNOME is political, people are too religious about these issues.
All I want is a higly integrated environment where I get by default 'best of breed' free apps from across GNOME/Windows/etc. As a user I don't care what langauge/api/toolkit an app uses, I want an unified seemless environment. I'm sick and tired of all the political debates, give me a cool user experience, not political diatribes on why I should belive religiously that Windows sucks and $YOUR_DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT is the best thing since slice bread.