Ken Gunderson wrote:
> On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:46:54 -0800
> Alan Coopersmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Kyle McDonald wrote:
>> The missing link here is deciding it's worthwhile to do that work.
>> When xscreensaver was added to Solaris during one of the Solaris 9
>> update releases it was explicitly to provide a screensaver for the
>> GNOME 2.0 desktop. Making it depend on GTK+ was a goal of that
>> work - making it installable without any GNOME libraries was not,
>> and is still not a goal today for those at Sun paid to do this work.
>
> "Making it depend on GTK+ was a goal of that work"
>
> Wow!! That's some extrordinarily bizarre goal setting there...
> Assumption that anyone running X will _also_necessarily want to be
> dependent on Gnome. Now to say that you're too lazy to separate the
> two is one thing, but to pass off as a "featured goal" is quite
> another, imho. I can imagine how the KDE4 integration team is feeling
> about that (just as one example from w/in Sun itself).
Only if you make the assumption that anyone running X but not running GNOME
will want to run the xscreensaver we built for GNOME integration - I
certainly don't assume that, and you can easily run X without it.
Sun's goal at the time was to deliver a GNOME desktop that met the
requirements of the US Government Section 508 regulations on Accessibility.
The interfaces available to meet that were GTK+ or Java Swing, so GTK+ was
chosen to reduce the change to porting the unlock dialog to a new toolkit
instead of porting to an entire new language & runtime environment.
Since Sun was only shipping CDE & GNOME, and CDE already had a screen lock,
and Solaris already had xlock for other desktops, xscreensaver was not
viewed as a generic X desktop feature, but part of the GNOME desktop.
There's nothing stopping anyone who wants to build their own desktop, such
as KDE, from building their own xscreensaver using another toolkit, or
xlockmore or another screen lock, or even using the Solaris provided xlock.
Of course, if they want xscreensaver to not use GTK+ at all, they'll also be
forking from upstream, since jwz (the upstream maintainer) has chosen GTK+
as the toolkit for the preferences interface, while he does not use it for
the unlock dialog as we do.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
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