Novell will (continue to) support KDE after all

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On November 16, 2005 16:03, Christopher Browne wrote:
> If someone is trying to influence the direction of an OSS project,
> they can either:
> a) Become one of the developers, making them one of the 0.01% that
> dictate what happens, or
> b) Work on your motivational skills, on the off chance that you can
> convince one or another of the "dictators" to do what you say, or
> c) Wish uselessly.

(Make the following c and the existing c, d)

c) Hire a developer to make things the way you think they should be. 
Money talks.

> I remember when both of them began, and it seems to me that BOTH
> have fallen off the tracks completely in terms of some of the
> important functionality that was intended.
>
> Those that remember the ability to write AREXX scripts to control
> Amiga applications may remember that there was an intent for GNOME
> and KDE to provide ways to allow scripting of control of their
> applications.
>
> The big RMS-versus-Tcl "war"
> <http://www.base.com/gordoni/web/tcl-rms.html> was another
> 'language war,' the crux of it being that RMS thought that a Lisp
> variant should be used for the purpose (from whence came Guile
> Scheme), and that Tcl was a terrible idea.  Unfortunately, people
> got over the "language war" by deciding to become so language
> agnostic that they never got around to having *any* scriptability. 
> GNOME wanted to use CORBA to describe interfaces to control their
> apps, and encouraged KDE to do the same; the suckage of MICO led to
> another "flame war" after which they all pretty much forgot about
> the original point.
>
> Which was that on AmigaOS and MVS and some other such places, you
> could write scripts that would interact with applications while
> they are running to do useful things.
>
> In about the last year, some efforts in this regard have
> re-emerged, but it has been 11 years since Commodore stopped
> selling Amigas, and we still can't expect to be able to write
> scripts to meaningfully control applications like Gnumeric,
> OpenOffice.org, and such, so one of the major original "selling
> features" of the desktop environments still remains unachieved.
>
> > This long ago stopped being a contest of innovation, since
> > neither GNOME nor KDE really is doing anything groundbreaking
> > (from the users' perspective). Elegance of internal design is a
> > fine issue for insiders, but there are many people who can't tell
> > Riesling from Shiraz and there are many who can't (and don't want
> > to be bothered to) pick a winner between KDE and GNOME.
>
> Until the apps are scriptable, I have to weigh in with a "They're
> all losers" vote...

I script KDE and KDE apps using DCOP and Python. It works. I have no 
idea if it is as sophisticated as Amiga/REXX since I have not used 
either.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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