Re: app wrappers and gworkspace

[Nicolas Roard]

Le 5 août 04, à 23:18, Alex Perez a écrit :

> > This is purely from an end-user's perspective, mind--I'm not a coder
> > nor OPENSTEP advocate, hence I probably just said something that runs
> > completely counter to the basic "philosophy". ;)
>
> I'm going to put on my asbestos suit here, and then say that I think 
> the
> whole obsession with the step philosophy /is/  actually the problem 
> here.
> GNUstep is multiplatform and we have to make concessions where 
> necessary.

Obviously. But we shouldn't just remove things without thinking -- I 
don't know for other
people here, but what I'd like for gnustep (desktop wise) is to have 
something with a clean
feel and quite inspired by OPENSTEP. If I was just wanting a nice ObjC 
dev environment
it would have been better to just try to improve ObjC wrapper for KDE 
or whatever.

> This is one of those areas. If someone disagrees with me here, please 
> stay
> in 1993 and go cry alone in your corner. The world moves on. Ideologies
> and philosophies are virtuous traits, but so is flexibility and a
> willingness to move foreward.

Well, I think we could discuss, no ?

> Please note that I am not saying we should
> not use appwrappers, just that they should be automagically generated 
> for
> non-gnustep apps in a more intelligent, canonical manner. The easy way 
> of
> going about this in a non-gnustep-centric, standardized way is by using
> .desktop entries, per the specification (which, as I will re-iterate, 
> is
> already in widespread use outside of the GNUstep comminuty) here:
> http://freedesktop.org/Standards/desktop-entry-spec/0.9.4/

My own opinion is that GWorkspace shouldn't deal with that anyway. We 
should
have some kind of "registry" listing all the applications and their 
roles (cf Stefan's previous
thread about roles btw). GWorkspace should just query that registry. 
And we could then
have different strategies to fill this registry (eg using App wrapper, 
or parsing .desktop, or...)
I think it's a cleaner solution as it separate the different aspects.

> A little more pragmatism will get us a long way...

Sure. But we shouldn't put pragmatism before clean solution, when 
possible...

--
Nicolas Roard
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
 -Arthur C. Clarke