Re: Why GTK+ vs. GNOME?

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Franck Martin (Franck@sopac.org) wrote at 18:02 on 11/08/00:
> 2)Some of the gnome libraries are related to display things on the screen,
> which gives applications a nice look. I think this part should be in GTK
> while drag and drop, bonobo,.. should stay in gnome. I tried to convert a
> gnome application created with glade to a gtk strict application. And I
> found out that I had to remove half of the Gnome GUI (buttons, menus,...) to
> recreate it manualy in GTK. I think this is the problem: the gnomeUI library
> should be a GTK library.

What exactly would the point of this be? You might as well just 'scrub'
gnome-libs and fold it into Gtk+? It does not make sense to 'move everything
into Gtk+' because then Gtk+ will become 'bloated'. 

How come I've never heard of people in the KDE group advocating moving widgets
into Qt?

GNOME is here to provide a consistent interface/desktop to *nix users. Gtk+ is
a cross-platform graphics toolkit. These are two largely different goals. 

Also - the fact of the matter is, the Gtk+ maintainers do not want to move all
the GNOME 'widgets' into Gtk+ because it will be maintenance nightmare for them.

In the future though (GNOME 2.0), the number of 'dependencies' for gnome-libs
will disappear. For example you won't need esd/audiofile (hopefully),
gdk-pixbuf is in Gtk+ and will be replacing all imlib usage. You will only
need very few additional packages to be able to compile gnome-libs (possible
bonobo, possible gnome-vfs, etc.)
 
> 3)KDE runs on Windows, which is why people think about KDE. You then reach
> 95% of the market. wxWindows is following the same principle it allows to
> code for Gnome and Windows. So Why not have this possibility directly in
> Gnome... I'm curious to see how StarOffice will be ported to gtk/gnome and
> still run on windows, OS/2 and MacOS...

Porting GNOME to windows is not something the core GNOME hackers want to work
on. They are just trying to provide a good consistent interface for the *nix
people. GNOME's goal is not to 'run on windows'. GNOME's goal is to make *nix
so easy to use that people will convert from Windows. 

The plain fact of the matter is, nobody has sat down to port GNOME to windows. A
lot of the infrastructure for that is there, but it has not grabbed anybody's
interest. Gtk+ has been ported to win32, libxml has been ported to win32,
There might be ORBit for win32 (if there isn't you can just use another ORB).
It is true that probably not /ALL/ of the infrastructure has been ported, but
you can't just 'expect everything Unix' to work on windows without some work.

If _YOU_ want GNOME to run on Windows. _YOU_ need to take the initiative

 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sean Middleditch [mailto:sean.middleditch@iname.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 11, 2000 1:38 PM
> To: Franck Martin; gnome-devel-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: Why GTK+ vs. GNOME?
> 
> 
> Franck Martin wrote:
> 
> > I think the major problem of all this is that GTK is cross platform, while
> > gnome is not: it runs on only one type of OS: Unix and Unix like.
> 
> Really?  what other platforms is gtk stable on?
> 
> > I like when I develop to use the Gnome bells and whistle, but I have the
> > feeling that most of it should be inside GTK rather than in GNOME.
> 
> Ok, think about this: if you put it in GTK, then that defeats the entire
> purpose of not having GNOME, doesn't it?
> 
> > For instance the Gnome icon set used for menus or toolbars should rather
> be
> > inside GTK, so when you port to windows, standard windows icons appears.
> 
> Does GTK use these icons?  I could understand wanting them in a seperate
> package, but placing icons in ANY binaries/source packge that doesn't
> require
> them is kinda ludicrous...
> 
> > Gnome is a desktop interface, and should stay that, while GTK is in charge
> 
> > of displaying anything on the screen in a standard manner..
> 
> That is true.  Good point.
> 
> > So everything will be levelled between KDE and GNOME, the day a
> > Windows/Mac/BeOS port of GNOME is started.
> 
> KDE runs on all these?
> 
> > Franck Martin
> > Database Development Officer
> > SOPAC South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission
> > Fiji
> > E-mail: franck@sopac.org <mailto:franck@sopac.org>
> > Web site: http://www.sopac.org/ <http://www.sopac.org/>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-devel-list mailing list
> > gnome-devel-list@gnome.org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-devel-list
> 
> Sean Middleditch
> 
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