There seems to be an awful lot of fuss over someone's simple suggestion of some way of standardizing the desktop. I think that everyone has taken it out of context, saying that defining a desktop standard is out of the scope of LSB, and that it would take away the customizability that we have. I say hooey. Remember, the point of LSB is to define certain standards that (hopefully) all distributions would follow, guaranteeing that certain things can be done in certain ways. For instance, making sure that printf() does what you want it do, regardless of where your application is installed. And this is something that is sorely needed in the graphical world. Sure, raw Xlib will always be there, but IMHO makes for more difficult coding than toolkits such as GTK+/GNOME and Qt/KDE, as well as being less 'pretty'. What the desktop *needs* is a standard way of getting things done, not necessarily a standard way of showing things. For example, your app needs a button, so you call a button() function that displays a button. Then the system's default (or user chosen) toolkit takes care of drawing the button in a way that is consistent *on that desktop*. I'm not sure if there should be wrappers to the various toolkits or what, but this really needs to be taken care of. If vendor X has product Y, they want it to work on distro A, B, and C without change. This is what LSB is all about. And in the increasingly graphical world of computing, this means that there HAS to be a standard way of getting things done in a graphical environment.
Someone mentioned servers and headless machines, where X is not an issue. Point well taken. However, some people have been talking about standardizing compiler environments, but no one mentions Joe Sixpack's home PC. Joe, who knows nothing about programming and just wants to surf the web, do e-mail, and use a word processor, has no need for a standard development environment. But he would benefit greatly from a standard desktop. I think what needs to be done to take care of this is borrow a page from UNIX98 and implement feature sets. For example, the graphical feature set, which defines the common API for drawing buttons, displaying text, etc. in a graphic environment. And the development feature set, which defines certain compiler default behaviors, header files, etc. My 0.02$US. +-----------------------------+--------------------------------+ | Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | NoDomainName Networks | http://www.nodomainname.net | +-----------------------------+--------------------------------+ -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCM d- s: a--- C++++$ UL++++$ P+++ L+++ E--- W++ N++ o k? !w--- O- M+ V PS--- PE+ Y PGP+ t+@ 5 X- R !tv b+ DI++ D++ G++ e h++ r++ y- ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
