Re: [Fsfe-uk] An ignorant question?

[Robin Green]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 10:41:07PM +0100, Chris Croughton wrote:
> Glade doesn't seem to work properly without Gnome, ditto KDevelop with
> KDE.  I use fvwm (and that's another rant, having applications which
> depend on a specific window manager is asking for trouble).

To my knowledge, there are no KDE applications (apart from the KDE panel
itself, and the WM's control panel) that depend on having the KDE window
manager running. You can run KDE apps under Gnome, and likewise, Gnome
apps under KDE. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Please note that KDE is not a window manager, but it does contain one.
Which is, as I just said, optional from a normal app writer's point of view.

Yes, KDE and Gnome apps can pull in a fair few dependencies. But if you
program to QT you only have one significant dependency: QT (and not even
that if you link to it statically). And the same is probably true for gtk.

I would hazard a guess that 99.9% of Linux users already have gtk installed,
anyway, if not QT. So if you program purely to QT or GTK dependencies shouldn't
be a problem - and if you program to KDE or Gnome, yes, there will be
dependencies - but we have things like apt-get and Linux distro CDs full of RPMs
to take care of things like that.

> I want
> something which will create straight X applications, not ones tailored
> to a specific WM.

Do you mean that you want your apps to look retro and ugly like xgammon
or xterm? They're what I would call "straight X applications".

Or do you mean you don't want dependencies on other people's toolkit code?

If you don't want to talk direct to X you're going to have to have
dependencies.

>  (And another common thing with X applications --
> where are the keyboard shortcuts?

It's ironic that you complain about KDE and Gnome and yet this is exactly
one of the problems that KDE has virtually solved. It's common to be able
to assign keyboard shortcuts to virtually every action in a KDE application,
using a user-friendly dialog box. No editing config files, no hacking C
code, no restarting!

-- 
Robin

Governments do not exist to provide lucrative contracts for proprietary software
developers.