[linux-audio-dev] Re: Which widgets?

> Ah, the sign of a good programmer. :)

There are actually people who still count, when

for (int i=0;i<n;i++)
  cout << i << endl;

is in itself a work of pristine beauty, immense practicality, and you
can spend a lot of time lying around while the machine approaches n.

The world is full of mysteries.

> It's true that with KDE you are marrying into KDE's family with bastard
> cousins like ksycoca, kdeinit, klauncher etc. But this isn't true with
> gnome.

Well I'm not kissing gnomecanvas.

>>That is why I recommend XFCE which does exactly that.

> Does xfce provide nice printing tools? How about VFS?

Printing? No idea. Haven't used any paper for ages. As for VFS IMHO
that's not the job of a desktop environment but of something mountable,
which can be accessed by XFFM, Nautilus, Konqueror and the Midnight
Commander alike. Where are the text-based frontends for KDE print
dialogs? We've got to have a little more flexibility and client server,
we're Unix!

> These two are the things I would _never_ want to implement: Extending a
> file selector to provide support for remote protocols and filling
> landfills/recycling plants with print dialog tests. argh. Of course,
> it's a matter of whether you really need the sorts of widgets etc. that
> these packages provide.

I agree that it is nice to have lot's of specialized APIs around. I also
believe they should be cult-free. Branding has done enough harm in the
commercial world.

> I'd rather give the users tried, tested & proved concepts which are well
> supported and developed onwards by people who really want to develop the
> sort of software it is. This would leave me to concentrate my efforts on
> what the application is really supposed to do.

I absolutely, whole-heartedly agree. I simply believe all those things
should be implemented in a cross-desktop manner so whoever feels like it
can run a frontend. If the same were true for file compression we'd have
seperate implementations of gzip for KDE, Gnome and Fluxbox, all of
which would be buggy and partly incompatible. That's obviously silly. We
need dedicated people to implement things ONCE and then have a bunch of
artists who can make consistent front-ends if they feel like it.
Back-end must be untied.

> Of course, we are free to do whatever we want. I just don't see real
> downsides to gnome integration.

As for frontends, sure! Backends must be desktop-independant or we have
Windowsware.

By the way, I'm really enjoying talking to intelligent people about
interesting subjects. I've been making some efforts to dumb myself down
a little recently in order to get a glimpse of the Sitcom-Loving world
but it's been like walking around with a chain ball on my anchle. This
is very refreshing.

Carlo
Received on Sun Feb 26 20:21:28 2006