[rescue] NeWS

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 @ 15:09 -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> On Sat, 21 Jan 2006, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
> > Yes, they have widget sets, huge ones, and guidelines, and IPC
> > (unfortunately based on Microsoft ideas), and all kinds of nifty bloat
> > and eye candy.

> Windows-style IPC would be a tremendous improvement over GNOME's
> misappropriation of CORBA.

Gnome dropped CORBA though. They only used it partway through 1.x and
moved to their own IPC system. I suppose you can say it is based on
CORBA, but I got lost some time ago, and it just doesn't look the same
to me any more.

> While I'm not a champion of the pig-beast from Redmond any longer, I'd
> kill for something as extensible as PostMessage() on Unix, rather than
> XSendEvent().

Well, that's not all Gnome and KDE use. Most of their IPC doesn't occur
over X protocols.

> Also, OLE, for all that it makes a mess of things, at least isn't as
> bloated and slow as KParts and Bonobo.

KParts and Bonobo are part of a whole framework, which affects how they
run, so you really can't single them out. The same is true of Windows
app support. I really think Windows is just as bad, worse in some areas,
and pretty much a mess that should not have been used as inspiration.

It's not that parts of it aren't kinda nice, its just that the overall
is such a mess I rather no one looked to it for inspiration.

Besides, that's kind of my point: instead of doing something better,
they are copying Microsoft technology. 

They are doing the same thing with application configuration:
duplicating the Windows registry and the Windows disease of misusing the
registry along with undocumented static config files scattered here and
there.

I know dotfiles are a mess, but Gnome has made this ten times worse,
with applications storing data and metadata in multiple and usually
undocumented locations. Gconf is a mess, and apps use it and static
files, scattering configuration all over your system.

Gnome zealots pretty well avoids Java because they claim it will allow
Sun to control the desktop...

...and yet, they put a lot of effort into duplicating Outlook/Exchange
and .NET.

The way I see it, the more code and data you have that depends on
tracking Microsoft technology, the more dependent you become on what
they do.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The object of war is not to die for your
country but to make the other bastard die for his." -- General George S.
Patton]