porting GNU Emacs to kde (?)

[Giannis Georgalis]

Hello !

I was thinking of trying to port GNU Emacs to the KDE[1] environment
in the near future. The main incentive for this decision, is my
desire to start using kdevelop[2] as my IDE (which is impossible
without Emacs ;-)). This is possible in KDE (and kdevelop in specific)
through the KPart[3] interface. This roughly means that Emacs should
become a shared object and export some functionality that implements a
well defined Editor interface. This way, Emacs can be used throughout
the KDE environment WHEREVER an editor is needed[4].

This is quite a complex task. And as I see it, it could be done in
two steps:
a) Make Emacs use the kde libraries as done with the gtk2 port.
b) "Organize" Emacs in a way that it can elegantly implement the
Editor interface mentioned above.

Note, that I'm familiar with the effort of Marco Correia (that also
send a mail to this list with a similar context), who begun (but
stopped eventually) to implement an Emacs KPart[3], using the
emacs-server interface.
Though Marco's approach (as he told me) is possible, IMHO it is
better to follow the former method because it can achieve far better
integration with the kde environment, while implementing all the
necessary "hooks" (and knowledge/code base) for a similar integration
with the GNOME environment (ORBit(?)), which I suspect, follows a
similar pattern.

As I'm not able to estimate the difficulties/complexity of such an
approach (I'm not familiar with the emacs internals), I firstly would
like to ask your opinion on the above matters and whether you think
this whole project would be useful from the "Emacs perspective".
Lastly, are there any other parameters, that would make this project
more difficult/impossible (eg. policy / ideological issues)?

Thank you,
Giannis

References:

[1] http://www.kde.org
[2] http://kdevelop.org
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPart
[4] see also vimpart.

-- 
question = ( to ) ? be : ! be;
                -- Wm. Shakespeare