Comments on: “Small pieces…” down the software stack

By: Ruzsa Balázs

Ruzsa Balázs — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 12:56:24 +0000

I think in the future applications running on platforms like KDE and GNOME will be written entirely in scripting languages like Python, Ruby or Lua. The platform will extend these scripting languages with a consistent set of classes (most likely separated into a “system” namespace), which act as proxies to the underlying open source C/C++ libraries handling the details.

In this model, it is not a problem that the low level libs come from wildly different developer cultures, as the high level app developers never interact directly with those layers, only with the interfaces provided by the platform.

By: Piece of Mind » Blog Archive » Cooperate on interface, compete on implementation

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:08:55 +0000

[…] While going around my feeds, found [quite an interesting post|http://ianmurdock.com/?p=282] from [http://ianmurdock.com/|Ian Murdock] about the need to agree on standards for open source development. […]

By: Piece of Mind » Blog Archive » Cooperate on interface, compete on implementation

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:06:28 +0000

[…] While going around my feeds, found [http://ianmurdock.com/?p=282|quite an interesting post] from [http://ianmurdock.com/|Ian Murdock] about the need to agree on standards for open source development. […]

By: Vinay Pawar

Vinay Pawar — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 07:43:51 +0000

Consistency is such an important matter that shoo’ing it away for political or user-vs-developer-advantage arguments, would take us nowhere.
Everyone understands that 100% consistency is unrealistic, both technically and otherwise.
Look at GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. they’re the pillars of the free software and GNU/Linux world. They’re not one or two programs, but more like platforms in themselves. A large number of programs are built over and around them, and standardization here would affect nearly all of them. But look at them, they all have their own file selection dialogs. For such a frequently used dialog, they’re radically different. I’m sure distribution vendors would love if there was an option for a common file selection dialog, which would use native GUI toolkits so other things like the look is consistent.

Consistency in some places is really critical. And the good thing is it seems achievable without major disruption.

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Vinay Pawar