On Saturday, June 9, 2012 10:28:05 Martin Gräßlin wrote: > On Saturday 09 June 2012 04:45:51 Aaron J. Seigo wrote: > > * losing portability to non-Linux (and even specific Linux OSes) > > something I would like to discuss in the light of workspace. > > I think we all agree that we do neither target MS Windows nor OS X. (I know > you can run plasma-desktop on Windows, but it's more a proof of concept than > anything else).
the full workspace does not, that's correct. there's no real point to that. > With other words: the non-Linux OSes do no longer support our minimum > runtime requirements, where it starts to be questionable to go the > additional way to keep portability possible (hello Sun Compiler). solaris is dead. the BSDs (ironically ;) are not. not all hardware is supported under Linux sufficiently either and the software pipelines are not yet good enough on most configurations, meaning that we can't even rely on Linux to support these new runtime requirements you're inventing here. yes, it is ultimately boring to not run off into the future we all know is coming as fast as we can. but at this point the cost is is very low to maintain the support we have for the non-composited case and that in turns maintains many happy users. i said this last year, and probably the year before that as well, but it is unfortunately still absolutely true: the state of opengl on even Linux is not good enough (though it one day will be) and we have non-negligable numbers of users relying on Plasma Workspace to work on non-Linux systems. btw, if we were to drop support for non-Linux OSes (besides losing the benefits keeping code portable usually has on the code base) you ought to be the one who goes, in person, to groups like PC BSD who are putting their time and money into that and tell them just how we don't give a fuck about them anymore. this is an ivory tower we can ill afford to climb into. > > i agree that it makes sense to drag kmix into kde-workspace since it > > really > > only makes sense in that scope. every other desktop has their own mixer, > > right? so there's no reason for someone to use kmix elsewhere. (unlike, > > say, digikam or gwenview.) > > interesting, I would consider gwenview part of the workspace as I think an > image viewer is nowadays one of the most essential applications a user > needs. 'how essential is the application' is not the measuring stick we've been using, otherwise the web browser would be part of the workspace too. (far before an image viewer ever would be, in fact.) it's a question of "is it something that the user starts explicitly to view / manipulate their information / data / etc.?" (there are a number of edge cases in that question, but you get the idea.) the desktop shell, the command runner, the window manager and various other components are started on behalf of the user to make the system essentially usable. system settings and similar applications are there to interact with the system itself, not to grant access (view/manipulate) the user's own information (files, contacts, websites, etc.) if we go down the path of "what application is essential to the user" we'll be utterly screwed because: * that changes over time * that changes between use cases * we want to give the user a clear frame for their applications and a way to distinguish cleanly between "this is my application i started" and "this is part of the system underneath" (the classic example are all the popup dialogs that we used to use for things like hardware events that looked exactly like an application's own dialogs: they would pop out of nowhere .. "where the #(*$ did that come from? what does it belong to?") the useful grouping is "what is part of the system" (user's POV) and "what are my applications with my information in them" -- Aaron J. Seigo
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