🚀 go-pugleaf

cbbrowne@news.hex.net (Christopher Browne) writes:
> 
> This is a complex jumble (jungle?) of stuff.  And the typical GNOME
> application needs the whole bunch of system components.  Which means
> that they're all necessarily quite deeply interwoven.  If one of them
> "breaks," the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
> 
> One could construct an equivalent list of things for KDE. 
>
... 
> 
> I don't think that this is a feasible project without going down to the
> application level and defining things from the *application*
> perspective, defining user interface as needed by applications rather
> than (as actually happens) by defining the "perfect UI" and then
> fiddling applications to conform with it. 
> 

How is it more stable to reimplement the same functionality in every
app independently?

At least with Gnome/KDE, you only have to debug it once.


Gnome certainly doesn't define a "perfect UI" and then make apps
conform - they can always drop back to Gtk or even Xlib if it makes
sense. But realistically, it's better to move UI decisions to the user
level; it's bad to have them made at the application level. This is
what Gnome does; since apps use a standard API, Gnome can make the UI
decisions, and Gnome does it by querying user preferences.

If every app decides on its own whether to have detachable toolbars or
where the scrollbar arrows go, the user is deprived of that choice,
and ends up with a bunch of inconsistent apps each with the app
programmer's preferences hardcoded.

Similarly, using CORBA allows the user to choose which app will
implement an interface; they will even be able to mix and match Gnome
and KDE apps, eventually.


I think you'll be impressed with Gnome's increasing stability. Check
out the next release. (I also think it's fundamentally wrong to take
instability in some of the current apps as meaningful - they are
changing *very* rapidly, and that's an inherently unstable thing.) The
proof will be in the finished code, though. :-)

Havoc Pennington ==== http://pobox.com/~hp