Desktop name collisions

I'd seen bloggers sounding off about confusingly different names for things in the different DE's. So it was little bit funny to see a "spat" arise out of a shift to a common naming and for that to be "confusing" to end user to.

The issue about application configuration goes deeper however. In systemd explanations Lennart Poettering talks about sysconfig variables, with view that application config file ought be directly worked with. Yet reason, why such variables were defined was to decouple distro Management tool, from multiple implementations of daemons, each with their own config files.

Now in this blog, the valid and more general point is made about applications sharing settings - http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/how-to-fix-co...

Indeed why not? Rather than every Email application having it's own replicated config, couldn't every Mailer use & set the basics, from a shared config?

Application integration ought not just be the job of a desktop, it would benefit everyone if rival implementations shared settings and the boring code to store them. Even developer's because they could concentrate on the novelties and use other tool initially to set up config, fleshing out these UI elements later.