[Pan-users] Re: Not following Gnome standard?

[Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA]

Em Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:22:07 +0000, Duncan escreveu:

> when Charles ported to 2, he went gtk-only, so pan >0.11 is a gtk+2 app, not
> gnome-specific.

        Oi vei!


> As such, pan can't use/require gnome file associations directly -- that
> would require linking against libgnome, which in turn would pull in many
> additional gnome dependencies (bonobo, orbit, gnome-vfs, gconf, etc).

        You mean depending on distribution, right?  Or are you talking about
build dependencies?

        This is a distribution problem… end users don’t usually compile, and
at least in Debian there is an effort to ‘granularise’ dependencies.


> This is undesired, to say the least, particularly when it's not required for
> anything except tracking file associations.  It would also create
> configuration nightmares for those who don't run gnome…

        OK, I am no coder and it is none of my business, but don’t people who
want a GTk+ app tend to also use Gnome?  If one is one other desktop environment
one will want a native toolkit, unless it is, for example, a Gnome user forced
to use MS Windows at work but wanting an app consistent with his home system.
And even so, Novell seems to be solving the problem well with Evolution.

         What I worry is that Pan (1) gets more complex, with more options to
set, (2) becames a lower common denominator app, (3) will end up being forked,
just as Firefox has its Gnome equivalent in Epiphany, (4) contributes to code
bloat in a running system.

         Like, Pan is nice and I intend to continue to use it.  But if someone
forked it to use libgnome and libgnet and all that, I would have a simpler,
better performing system.  And there are already W32 alternatives for MS
Windows, and there will be probably Qt ones for KDE, GNUStep ones for GNUStep
and Mac OS, FLTK ones for XfCE…


> What pan does instead is let you configure specific apps for handling
> these things.

        This is no good… one wants something to just work, with system-wide
settings.


> That in fact is what pan is doing when it honors the GNOME settings for
> browser and email client.  It is simply invoking the GNOME executable that
> in turn invokes whatever is configured for GNOME.

        At least in GNU/Linux systems, it should then use /usr/bin/editor or
$EDITOR.  


> If the former, you'll have to post your email address in user at domain
> dot tld format for me to see what's going on

leandro at dutra dot fastmail dot fm


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