Time to sweat the details (was Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board....)

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

For various reasons, I've had to set up a number of systems (Debian/Redhat) 
recently for my own and for demo usage.  This is a a major disaster from 
the end user perspective (me and others being the end user, in this case)...
Take a week or two out of your life sometime, and try installing a system
from scratch, and not just getting the environment you use set up
well, but attempt to make everything work well... It is enlightening,
to say the least.

We need to get key developers from a number of projects truly cooperating
closely: these include: Gnome, KDE, XFree86, Freetype, Ghostscript,
CUPS, LPRNG, etc.

Now that the base technologies of both Gnome and KDE are coming
together, this sort of interoperability should become our
burning issue, in my humble (or not) opinion.

Some work has been on going on window manager standards in 
the opendesktop.org area, but we need to go much further to
unify (at least from the user's perspective):
	o configuration of themes
	o configuration/installation of fonts (both for screen and printer use)
	o selection of fonts for UI elements
	o menu presentation
	o configuration of mimetypes/viewers etc, both between
	web browsers (Netscape/Mozilla) and base desktop environments.
	o Even inside of Gnome, I could not get nautilus to share
	the fonts I got the rest of Gnome to use!
	o There was something else major I know I'm forgetting, but
	you get the gist!  The list is longer, by alot.
Right now, you get to do things (at least) twice, and often
three or four times in setting up a system to be usable.  This sucks.

I hope to have some time to put together an editorial on this topic sometime 
soon....  But troops with the burning passion to help get this fixed would 
help greatly.

For example, people to help work on the font configuration tools and work 
with Keith Packard on getting Xft2 (and his font configuration library, 
no longer tied to X as of a few weeks ago), everywhere would help greatly 
on that front.

We need to start sweating the details, folks!  We can't rely on the distro's 
to clean up our messes after us properly, either: default behavior needs 
to be good as the software is initially built or installed (so they don't 
feel obligated to "fix" it.  If the initial defaults are broken, relying 
on distro vendors to fix turns out to be a *BAD* strategy, as they know 
less than the developers and often get things from a bad state to a worse 
state (example: as shipped, the XftConfig file I found on one system was 
so broken as to make KDE's font's and appearance truly horrid after 
installing Microsoft True Type fonts on one system).

So there is both technical work, social work, and self discipline needed...
				- Jim


--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
Compaq Computer Corporation
jg pa dec com


> Sender: foundation-list-admin gnome org
> From: john john pp se
> Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 09:29:07 +0100
> To: foundation-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting February 12 2002
> -----
> > It might also be useful to organize a specific joint project,
> > something that would improve the coherence of a GNU/Linux system
> > which uses parts of both GNOME and KDE.  The idea that occurred to me
> > was to work on unifying theme definitions, so that a user can define
> > a theme just once and have it work with both GNOME and KDE.  Perhaps
> > others will have a better suggestion.
> 
> I checked out the wxwindows project (a toolkit which wrapps other toolkits
> such as gtk+ and motif) recently and noticed on the "Ongoing Projects" that
> there was a wxQT-project. The description is:
> 
> "Port of wxWindows 2 to the
> Qt toolkit. The idea is to
> partly unify the KDE and
> GNOME camps who
> currently use Qt and GTK
> toolkits respectively. With
> wxQt and wxGTK,
> developers will be able to
> write for both desktops
> simultaneously, plus any
> other platforms supported by
> wxWindows."
> 
> To bad the status of the project is "Investigation stalled", but perhaps it
> could be a different approach to unify the desktops? Atleast it gives the
> third-party developers a chance to support both instead of having to choose
> one platform.
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