Why is there no OS X Automator clone for Linux? (was: Serious OO/Debian problem...)

[Christopher Browne]

On 7/14/06, Jason Spiro <jasonspiro4-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 7/14/06, Mike Kallies <mike.kallies-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> ...
> > I've never worked with it, but I have to wonder how a common set of
> > application controls can be created on the Linux desktop... I mean,
> > even if KDE has a scripting tool, can it interact with OO?  Could it
> > ever?
> ...
>
> Well, I assume DCOP is for KDE apps, not for other apps. It's a sad
> side effect of having both KDE and Gnome around: presumably if you
> want DCOP scriptability between, say, a web browser and a spreadsheet,
> you must download both a KDE web browser and a KDE spreadsheet.

That's why DCOP will be replaced by D-BUS in KDE 4...

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus

> Why can't Unix pipes (or temp files) and standard formats like CSV and
> MPEG2 somehow be used for this sort of data interchange between two
> apps, instead of requiring DCOP, AppleScript, and/or Windows
> clipboard-like data interchange systems?

If you imagine CSV to be a "standard format" in any sense of the term
"standard," you obviously have never tried to build a parser for it...

- Pipes *aren't* enough, because they provide no type information.
- Originally, CORBA was supposed to be the way that apps would
interact.  There are still vestiges of this; search /usr/share for
.idl files, and you'll find the interfaces people were defining for
Bonobo...
-- 
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`||'s unless you think Gödel's theorem is for sissies'.
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