KDE's Project Silk [LWN.net]

KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 22, 2009 13:16 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: KDE's Project Silk by sebas
Parent article: KDE's Project Silk

The same benefit any project is FDO is supposed to have. Help more users by working with other desktop environments instead of just one.

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KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 22, 2009 13:50 UTC (Tue) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]

You mean like X.org? Or the broken standardization process we're currently
trying to fix? No thanks...

If you look at Silk, you'd see that it's not a piece of code that can be
on FDO or not, it's a KDE-wide effort to improve on web integration in the
desktop and in application. You can think of it more as a set of loosely
connected components, plugins for applications for example, but also Qt-
that typically would belong onto Freedesktop.org. On top of that I'd not
be willing to implement these things without usign KDE infrastructure and
libraries.

If other projects want to adopt pieces of the code or interact with Silk
developers, that's fine of course. Still, I don't see any benefits from
making Silk an FDO project.

KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 22, 2009 13:51 UTC (Tue) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]

Aah. Parts of my reply got eaten!

... but also Qt-style APIs. Most of Silk is nothing that typically would
belong onto Freedesktop.org. ...

KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 22, 2009 13:54 UTC (Tue) by hunger (subscriber, #36242) [Link]

How does the usefulness of a project depend on the website that is hosting it? Frankly, FDO is just one of many websites that hosts open source projects.

Plus this seems to be highly KDE specific (using KDE technologies and Qt all over the place), so what sense is there to try to make it cross desktop?

KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 22, 2009 15:10 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The website that hosts it would indicate the intentions of the project. FDO is the place to host specifications and code that would not be desktop environment specific.

The suggestion isn't merely to push KDE specific code to FDO. That would not make sense. Instead work with other desktop environments on things that can be shared. If code cannot be shared, specifications can be.

KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 22, 2009 20:49 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

When we do work on specifications, we do take them to freedesktop.org. After all, it's an organization KDE helped create and one which we continue to help improve. Recent additions include the Open Collaboration APIs for Free software online services (which does relate to Silk topically) and the Notification Items specification. The recent work on the Notification specification to finally bring that one together is another nice example, though not a brand new spec.

Silk, by contrast, is not about specifications, it's about very specific integration points (source code) between existing and future KDE applications and online content. So Silk is not something that would make any sense on freedestop.org, though others who are involved with freedesktop.org may wish to work on similar integration points in their software.

HTH clear things up a bit. :)

KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 24, 2009 2:59 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I was mainly thinking refactoring the code to split it into toolkit/desktop agnostic C libraries and the per-desktop code linking against Qt/GTK etc. The desktop-agnostic code could then live at FDO. A really good example of this is the Telepathy project.