Re: GNUstep and the desktop

[Sheldon Gill]

Great!  Definitely the right track and the one I've been following for a while 
myself...

Conceptually we're agreed that these things need to be separated out cleanly. 
There are IMHO many things, even if Fred doesn't agree at the moment.

Practically, though, I'd like to suggest this approach:

We want -gui to be a clean interface, portable and unassuming in so far as we 
can achieve it. With this in mind, we move those other elements away to

gui/Sources/Desktop

with compile time configuration switches to determine the exact Desktop 
implementation code to use. It's probably wise to do these in a sub-directory 
so that we have

gui/Sources/Desktop/Backbone
gui/Sources/Desktop/Win32
gui/Sources/Desktop/KDE

so people can work on these things and see progress in others. Over time we 
can work towards

gui/Sources/Desktop/Common

and from there, later, decide how we can best go forward.

I'm recommending this because:

* I can see a useful degree of sharing between KDE and GNOME backends, at 
least in design.

* Detecting and adjusting to an X window manager will be common code...

* In so far as Backbone wants to be freedesktop.org friendly, there is 
probably a reasonable amount to share there, too. (I haven't seen any 
Backbone design docs so I don't know...)

* I'm thinking that NSSound will become a wrapper for
Desktop/Sound/arts
Desktop/Sound/esd
Desktop/Sound/ALSA
Desktop/Sound/MusicKit  (*looks at Leigh*)

* Bundle separation for a Win32 desktop really doesn't seem to make sense to 
me at all. Apps in this environment either need desktop integration or not. 
If you need it, you need it and it's the same desktop for everyone. If you 
don't want it, don't use it. Conditionally compile it away.

* It's going to take a while to factor out the appropriate methods and get 
agreement about what, where and how.

Thoughts/feelings/ideas?


Regards,
Sheldon