Re: Discussion vs. consideration (of KDE/KIllustrator)

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@omegacs.net>]

> Just a hunch ... but I believe changing the underlying widget set is
> about as simple as starting almost from scratch. 
Probably, though a significant percentage of the code is the drawing core, 
which hopefully is quite widget-independant.  Still, it wouldn't be a 
trivial undertaking by any means.

> Ahh Omega.  Always the voice of reason.
I try my best. :-)

> ( this is a good thing :).   
Yup.  I assume you mean that KIllustrator in it's first beta looks like 
CorelDraw, no the other way around?  I don't think I want to know what 
CorelDraw looked like in its first beta... :)

> There is a project started now that aims to create a free QT Widgetset.
> Not the whole thing but just the subsection used by KDE.  They already
> have a few thousand lines of code in place and are working at a swift
> pace.  
Hmmm, sounds very good.  It'd be nice if they could do the entire Qt 
toolkit eventually, though enough for KDE is enough for me (for now).

What would be good is if FreeQt could be built on top of GTK, or at least a 
branch set up to do so.  This would be slower, yes, but it would provide 
the advantages of GTK, specifically access to an ORB (dunno how a Qt app on 
top of FreeQt on top of GTK would do CORBA, but it's a thought), and most 
importantly, a unified visual environment.

Yes, I'm still leaning towards GNOME/GTK.  From what little time I've had 
to look through the architectures, GNOME wins.  However, what if we were 
able to create a GTK-on-top-of-Qt library as well, and let users switch 
between the two looks?  All the apps that come with the desktop environment 
would be built against only their native libs, but big apps could be linked 
against a switchout library.

This is all random thoughts and likely not possible, but it would allow 
both (Free)Qt-based and GTK-based apps to work seamlessly in either 
environment, without having to do anything more than setting a resource 
(the switchout libraries would read that and direct the function call to 
either the native function or the 'translation/emulation' function).

> It would be a shame to have the best Linux desktop not included in 
> major distributions for almost a year ( that's how long it will take
> GNOME to get where KDE is now ... and who knows where KDE will be 
> then ? )
You have a point.  If FreeQt shows up in a reasonable amount of time, SEUL 
may indeed ship KDE/FreeQt, then later on ship GNOME as well, ideally with 
the aforementioned switchout libraries and emulation.

Thoughts?

TTYL,
    Omega


     Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
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      |    | M E G A            Creating a Linux distribution
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