I have a few things to say about the whole desktop environment thing. First of all, if you think there is a project that should or shouldn't be using a particular desktop environment unlike the way it is now, you should write your code, submit the patch, optionally try to convince the project maintainers to accept the patch; otherwise at your freedom you may fork the project and start a new one, like mplayer and mplayerxp did, or GNU emacs and Xemacs.
Second, from a proper software engineering point of view, a large scale application like a sequencer is better off not to write everything from scratch, so using some desktop environment function is natural. As Richard Bown said, rosegarden uses DCOP to communicate different portions. However, there is no easy way to write an interprocess communication that is portable. Using posix messages/shared memory is one alternative, but I'm not sure how effective it is for rosegarden. As DCOP communicates over unix sockets, does anyone know about the performance implications between sockets and posix messages in general? Anyhow, I'm not arguing for either rosegarden should or should not use KDE. I might say it would be nice if the code can be compiled with KDE turned off, like the licq qt-plugin, but I think it really isn't up to me to say that. ;-) liulk
