Some highlights from this week's KDE Commit-Digest (all in one page):
Umbrello adds a Ruby code generator.
Kalzium now has a chemical equations solver.
New recurrence code for libkcal.
Kopete adds support for receiving AIM buddy icons.
Kopete supports Richtext formatting in Yahoo! Messages.
Dot Categories:
Comments
... is missing again.
Oh, so that's why I can read it without a horizontal scrollbar showing up in Akregator...
From derek's blog:
"Next on the shopping list is an uninterruptible power supply. As rsync was rsyncing the svn repository, the power went off and on very quickly. I think I got a corrupted file system in that partition, and it will take a while to get a working repository. The digest is getting it's data from anonsvn.kde.org (don't worry, it's cached). There won't be any statistics until I get things fixed."
> Yolla Indria (yolla) committed a change to in HEAD
> initial version of libppt (Google SoC project)
Nice! Are there any updates as to whether this project is still on schedule, and how much can be done already? See
http://developer.kde.org/summerofcode/pptimport.html
How comes the Linux Standard Base Project has declared GNOME as Standard Desktop for Linux ?
http://www.linuxbase.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=61
"Following libraries are essential for many desktop applications. They are not currently under consideration due to lack of resources:"
referring to Qt, among others.
Lack of resources is a nice way of saying lack of relevance and support in the real world.
In other words, don't worry.
Derek
For the slow class - I've just read the wiki on LSB, and the issues seems to be about the requirement for a developer to purchase a licence. I did not think that to be correct.
My understanding is that (a) if you want to develop free software Trolltech are cool, (b) if you want to develop proprietary software Trolltech want money.
Whatever one might think of point (b), regarding point (a) IIRC, everyone from RMS down seems to agree that Qt meets a free software definition.
Anyone care to enlighten me and if there is no need to enlighten me, to offer their explanation about why the licensing doesn't meet the LSB standard?
i don't get it... they should dis-allow the LGPL, as it is bad for free software (it allows development of proprietary software without ANY contribution to the community. i think that is bad. the QT way of licensing forces everyone to contribute, either with code or with money. you recieve. you help. period).
You misunderstand the function of the LSB. They're an industry consortium primarily concerned with promoting a "standard base" for proprietary software vendors.
Up to a point that's a good thing, but honestly most proprietary vendors don't really care much about which desktop libraries are installed as they care about where they're going to go when they're installed and that the ABI will stay stable.
The LSB's more-proprietary-than-the-proprietary-guys stance has cost them quite a bit in terms of community buy-in. Roughly I'd say they have none in the OSS development community. It's not a huge surprise that the GNU project specifically is very anti-LSB. And that's a bit unfortunate since some of the conceptual goals aren't terrible.
well, if the LSB ppl are so commercially controlled, they probably try to make Trolltech LGPL their Qt... won't work, i guess, as that'll cost trolltech most of their income. pitty they are so stubborn (the LSB ppl, not trolltech).
No! They are not commercially controlled, they live under some missconception that most commercially vendors have a problem with paying for their development tools. As said in the comment you answer to: "most proprietary vendors don't really care much about which desktop libraries are installed as they care about where they're going to go when they're installed and that the ABI will stay stable". Since serious business entities don't have a problem with it, they have either bought into the in the real-world-not-existing licensing problem or they are playing the politics/FUD game with the GPL/LGPL issue.
Qt is free software now, as long as you don't want to sell proprietary software build on it (as we all know). Thing is I think most people think Linux is only good enough if it free (not as in beer not as in speech but as in cheapskate). For those that think so, paying for QT is a burden that would shoo developers away from Linux.
My 2 cents.
> My understanding is that
> (a) if you want to develop free software
> Trolltech are cool,
> (b) if you want to develop proprietary software
> Trolltech want money.
This cannot be stressed enough! it basically is a better GPL because it also (meaning additionally) allows for commercial software development (in _exactly_ the same way as it would be on a Borland/Microsoft/whatever platform)
i guess this license scheme should be dubbed BGPL (better GPL), which would be the opposite of LGPL (guess what the L is for) ;)
yes - ESR annoys me these days
yeah, L stands for lesser :D
More information on this issue can be found on http://www.linuxbase.org/futures/ideas/issues/libqt/
Because it's GPL so the LSB says it's not good. It doesn't meet their 'licensing criteria'.
Of course, when wise people see that their criteria lead to absurd conculsions such as 'the/a real standard should not be th/ae real standard', they change their criteria to account for reality, they don't pretend to change reality to account for their criteria.
Which brings us to the conclusion that the LSB people are not wise :) Considering that they also lack methods of coercion (I do hope they lack them :)), they are not dangerous and can be safely ignored.
>Because it's GPL so the LSB says it's not good. It doesn't meet their 'licensing criteria'.
Which makes me wonder what kind of kernel lsb wil use :o)
The FreeBSD one of course.
The LSB somehow changed their goals.
As far as I understand their original goal was to provide a common platform that ISVs could easily deploy their applications on.
Nowadays their goal is to provide a common platform that makes development as cheap as possible.
So while they initially (to my understanding) targeted the user machines, they now target the developer machines.
All this licensing nonsense is getting tiresome.
Telling somebody that a piece of software cannot be standard on GNU/Linux because it's being distributed under the GNU GPL is utterly absurd. We should no more debate this point.
It is obvious that some people with deep emotional malfunctions (obsessive-compulsive syndrome, i suspect), who for certain reasons only known to themselves and their likes hate Qt, are trying to come up with a conspiracy and kill Qt/KDE.
The point is, conspiracies don't work. Because reality is too complex for them, it's too complex for sophisticated plans. And if Adobe took them seriously, that was just a mistake on Adobe's side (of course, if many people repeat the mistake, certain regretable effects might occur, like bedirtyfying linux with primitive APIs)
KDE seems to be the most used open source desktop environement, KDE/Qt provide an excellent framework for developers to write applications. I don't think that it really matters what LSB/RedHat or whoever prefers, what really matters in the long run is technology. KDE/Qt IHMO offers developers an excelllent development framework and thus developers will chose KDE/Qt to develop applications and KDE/Qt applications will probably outdistance other applications in the long run because of that. And better applications means more users. Other toolkits can never outdistance KDE/Qt if they are actually technically inferior and if they make it harder to develop software using them. The only way to outdistance KDE/Qt is to create something that is technically superior and that makes large scale application development easier then with KDE/Qt. For now I don't see something like that.
"..what really matters in the long run is technology."
...said the marketing manager at Philips about their Video system...
"And better applications means more users."
..was not exactly on the mind of the marketing manager at Sony when he was promoting VHS.
Porn works very well in KDE too, so I don't think it'll have the problems Video2000 had ;DDD
Ciao,
Rob!
Why did Adobe, that has an investment in Qt (some of its MS-windows tools are now written with Qt, most notably photoshop album), has chosen GTK+ as the toolkit for their new Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux ?
They surely didn't have to take developer licensing costs into account (having already made that investment) ? So, why GTK+ and not Qt ?
If I might hazard a guess, its because GTK+ made it into LSB and is expected to be available on LSB compatible platforms, while Qt isn't and integrating with it will potentially require more work. Unless Qt is added to LSB on the same level as Qt, we would possibly see more and more commercial applications forgo Qt in favor of GTK+.
I once heard that there is only one developer working on it and that this developer simply prefered gtk. I don't know if this is true.
acrobat reader is about 100 mb big onder Linux.
So I don't think they were interested in a lsb-compliant system, they just put everything they need into the package.
One of the consequences of adobes choise is that acroread does not interact well with Gnome, in dispite of the fact that they both use gtk..
So you all are basically saying that one of the largest software vendors in the world makes software development choices for one of its leading products, which are
- based on personal preference of the developer in charge
- inconsistent
- stupid
And by pure chance these lead to not choosing Qt. I somehow find it hard to believe.
I think I have a better explanation: Adobe addresses a future where LSB compliant linux systems, containing libgtk+ (currently LSB still does not contain libgtk+) are the majority of Linux installations (regardless if any of these does or does not feature libqt), and in order to facilitate easy installation for user (and reduce binary size), they will have to build on GTK+.
In the mean time, they have to package the GTK+ binaries, but that requirement is expected to be lifted at a future date, at which point the Adobe Acrobat Reader installation will be significantly reduced in size and complexity and will interact better with the underlying desktop system (which may or may not be GNOME).
And this is a shame.
ldd /usr/bin/acroread
not a dynamic executable
acroread is statically linked against gtk+, it does not matter if you have gtk+ installed on your system or not. Although acroread uses gtk+, it has its own toolbar and things like Navigation tabs -> Articles do not look like they are done using gtk. Acroread is definitely not written using gtk, the gtk-UI looks more like a quick&dirty hack to get rid of the old motif UI which had serious problems like a non-working mouse wheel. Maybe it is just easier to port an existing app to gtk then to Qt because Qt more or less is a full development framework and it probably does not work very well if you mix it with other UI code like the toolbar acroread uses? But anyway, acroread is definitely not the kind of application I want to see on Linux because it is quite obvious that Adobe did not care much about the UI and if it integrates with any of the major OSS desktops.
> Maybe it is just easier to port an existing app to gtk then to Qt because Qt more or less is a full development framework and it probably does not work very well if you mix it with other UI code like the toolbar acroread uses?
Doubt it. See http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/migrate/motif.html.
ldd /usr/bin/acroread
not a dynamic executable
This message is fully understandable as the "acroread" program is a bash script which calls a binary executable. On my OpenSuse 10.0 system, the binary is /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/Reader/intellinux/bin/acroread. Inspecting it with ldd gives to me:
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libBIB.so => not found
libACE.so => not found
libAGM.so => not found
libCoolType.so => not found
libAXE16SharedExpat.so => not found
libJP2K.so => not found
libResAccess.so => not found
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x4003e000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x40042000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x40050000)
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x40149000)
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x4043d000)
libatk-1.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0 (0x404bf000)
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 (0x404d8000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x404ee000)
libpangox-1.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libpangox-1.0.so.0 (0x40514000)
libpango-1.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0x4051f000)
libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0x40558000)
libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0x40592000)
libglib-2.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x40595000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x4061d000)
libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0 (0x4062f000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x4063e000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (0x4075e000)
libcairo.so.2 => /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2 (0x40765000)
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x407b2000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x40820000)
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x40850000)
libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0x40859000)
libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0x40898000)
libglitz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libglitz.so.1 (0x408ab000)
libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x408cf000)
libXi.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x408d3000)
libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x408db000)
libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0x408df000)
libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXfixes.so.3 (0x408e8000)
libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 => /opt/gnome/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (0x408ed000)
libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x40912000)
>And by pure chance these lead to not choosing Qt. I somehow find it hard to believe.
The fact that Qt is not a standard part of Windows did not stop them in using Qt for their photo album application.
So why should the fact that Qt is not a standard part of Linux (although afaik every respectable Linux distribution includes Qt by default) make them decide not to use it?
"Why did Adobe, that has an investment in Qt (some of its MS-windows tools are now written with Qt, most notably photoshop album), has chosen GTK+ as the toolkit for their new Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux ?"
Because they had one developer working on it who preferred GTK, and what's more, he had absolutely no budget to go with it.
"They surely didn't have to take developer licensing costs into account (having already made that investment) ? So, why GTK+ and not Qt ?"
Because it isn't economically viable for using Qt yet. When it is, desktop Linux will have arrived. I'm sure Adobe spent lots of money on development tools for Windows, so why they feel they should they feel they shouldn't do so for Linux?
"If I might hazard a guess, its because GTK+ made it into LSB and is expected to be available on LSB compatible platforms, while Qt isn't and integrating with it will potentially require more work."
I doubt whether Adobe even knows the LSB exists, or even cares quite frankly. No one else does.
"Unless Qt is added to LSB on the same level as Qt, we would possibly see more and more commercial applications forgo Qt in favor of GTK+."
The reason why GTK is apparently chosen more for these sorts of things (not for a lot of *real* applications developed in companies out there though) is the fact that desktop Linux is not yet viable. Yes, you read that right - until Qt is more widely used and people see the need to pay for licenses, desktop Linux has not arrived.
Yes, you read that right - until Qt is more widely used and people see the need to pay for licenses, desktop Linux has not arrived.
Desktop Linux has not yet arrived thanks to crappy gnome installed on major distros.
and that's a good thing, right? thanks to gnome, serious DE's under linux are not a monoculture. please leave setting deadlines for world domination to microsoft, and revel in the freedom of choice foss gives you.
"Desktop Linux has not yet arrived thanks to crappy gnome installed on major distros."
Installed on what major distros? It certainly doesn't stop up to two-third of desktop users from using KDE.
> Why [...] Adobe [...] has chosen GTK+ as the toolkit for their new Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux ?
Given that the Acrobat Reader 7 for Linux ist a fat and slow piece of software, that's annoying to work with, I'd be really interested what would be Adobe's answer.
I don't know why LSB have decided for gnome but
KDE -- last year's leader -- has increased its dominance, growing from 44 percent to 61 percent of respondants. GNOME 27 percent last year and 21 percent this year
http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT2127420238.html
including gnome as standard desktop is a fucked political reasons.....
I doub some poll in a forum full of KDE geeks is accurated, in that case, remember tha in www.osnews.com GNOME was the favorite DE.
It also won at linuxquestions.org by a nice margin. And osnews.com poll was not very fair... if you remember, they closed it before many people had a chance to vote.
What im telling you, that those sites are visited by geeks, not the average user.
The average user wont visit or vote in those places.
If we take another stadistic, take for example distrowatch.com where ubuntu a full GNOME distro is in the number 1 position, kubuntu is to far from that.
Polls are not reliable, can be biazed, exploded, etc.
I don't believe the 60% of Linux user use KDE, I'd say a 40%.
"What im telling you, that those sites are visited by geeks, not the average user."
Are there average users using Linux? ;-)
What matters anyway is that KDE is a very important DE, used by too many people to exclude it from a "standard". It simply won't happen, IMHO.
I think the same, but being the most used it doesn't mean that it has the be the one who will dicted the standars, it must be an important contributor, nothing else.
Just because Qt/KDE is not part of LSB, that does NOT stop distributions shipping it even if they are LSB-Compliant!
> If we take another stadistic, take for example distrowatch.com where ubuntu a
> full GNOME distro is in the number 1 position, kubuntu is to far from that.
Not a good example since Kubuntu is not a fork of Ubuntu but part of the project. I always wondered why they listed it seperately.
> I don't believe the 60% of Linux user use KDE, I'd say a 40%.
Funny, first you criticise polls and then you just make up numbers of your own. How much more reliable can your estimate be?
"Polls are not reliable, can be biazed, exploded, etc."
Wow, really?
"I don't believe the 60% of Linux user use KDE, I'd say a 40%."
Funny. Based on what, exactly? Is there a poll or survey somewhere?
Does people needs to be defensive here?
Wtf is wrong with all of you.
He is just guessing you assholes.
> assholes
Bzzzt. You're out.
Go away.
And the overreaction award goes to..
Wow. The LSB actually matter these days?! Given that most people are using KDE anyway, I doubt whether many people are going care whether their desktop is part of a standard base or not.
Is not about KDE, aren't you reading? it is about Qt, you can still use KDE but with GTK applications.