On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:41:58 +0100 JM <fijam@archlinux.us> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 3:01 PM, <hollunder@gmx.at> wrote:
[snip] When will "Desktop" people start to see that they are being intrusive? They live in their own small bubble called GNOME or KDE and can't ever imagine anyone not wanting to use this. Sorry for this "slightly" off topic rant, but it annoys me on a regular basis when I see applications depend on gnome or kde, mostly for some stupid reason called 'integration' which really isn't of much use in the specific DE they integrate with and a hindrance to everyone who's not running exactly that DE.
Being a Xfce user I wholeheartedly agree. I left Xubuntu for Arch a few years ago looking for minimal dependencies on applications and a way to recompile offending applications if needed. I have found what I needed.
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer applications are "desktop-agnostic" these days. To install a gtk2 application I am usually asked to download half of GNOME or at least libgnomeui and gconf. Gconf is my personal favourite. Xfce already uses xfconf (btw I love its description in the repository:"xfconf.. thingie" -- looks like not only I am confused), why am I supposed to use two different configuration databases? Why can't people agree on one? Why not just save configuration in plain files, it has worked before...
I have been filing feature requests on bugtrackers for alternative configuration systems, maintaining biased AUR packages and bugging Arch devs about sudden additions of dependencies. But I feel I am losing. We are destined to live in a convoluted mass of redundant dependencies.
Regards, JM
Wait until dbus eat our babies and the dependency threads strangle us :) Well, I guess they try to 'integrate' again, all config in one place, but again only for their bubble. I also encountered gconf a couple of times, and a bunch of other stuff as well. For me gtk and gnome are two very different things. Same goes for qt and kde. Yet application developers seem to rarely see a problem with adding gnome/kde dependencies to their gtk/qt app. I wonder why this is. I also wonder why they don't make more stuff optional. Probably because it's hard, but what is the hard part there?