mon journal - par Vincent - Letter from Akademy - Comments

Letter from Akademy - Vincent

Vincent — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:44:04 +0000

T.J.: your question probably need a proper reply, which needs quite some time. Unforunately, I don't have that time right now. But the basic answer is that it's not going to happen for various reasons. The jump to GTK+ 3 will be minor for application developers (even with the API/ABI breaks), while switching to Qt would be a huge task that would take years. There are also other things to consider like licensing (we like LGPL for our platform, and Qt is GPL), just to give one example among many others.

Anonymous: I didn't especially notice differences during Akademy. I probably wasn't clear: what I noticed what was similar -- I already knew about (most of) our differences.

Letter from Akademy - Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:29:22 +0000

> there are certainly big differences between our two communities

Which did you notice at the conferences?

Letter from Akademy - T. J. Brumfield

T. J. Brumfield — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:07:14 +0000

I'm curious what you think about Mark Shuttleworth's comments about Gnome possibly being built on top of QT in the future. QT ships with a Clearlooks engine, and from what I continually here, QT themes are easier to develop. In theory, one could write a QT app to look and operate exactly like existing Gnome apps.

If the Gnome community is at a point where there is serious discussion about breaking ABIs/APIs and looking towards the long-term future, if ever there was a time to talk about such a concept, wouldn't it be now?

I think there are some amazing potential advantages. All apps would look the same and integrate into either desktop. Theming would be easier. It would cut down on some redundant projects that aim to make the same app in the GTK and QT worlds. Instead of writing a new GTK 3 from the ground up, you could start focusing on Gnome libs almost immediately with an existing toolkit that would provide most of what you need immediately, and a toolkit that offers some very good performance.