As a much smaller project/community (LXDE), we always feel that it's not very easy to get involved in freedesktop.org. Although the mailing list is theoratically open to everyone, things used by Gnome or KDE or pushed by mainstream distro makers tends to get much more attention due to there high publicity and large user base.
Most of the time, things developed by KDE and Gnome teams are quite good both in quality and the design. But the problem is, the specs designed by them might not be suitable for desktop environments other than Gnome and KDE since we all have different goals and design principles. That's why there are so many different desktop environments. Given the much more limited resources and development man power we have, it's very difficult for us, other smaller desktop projects, to spend as much effort as Gnome or KDE in this area. So it might seem that we are not actively join the discussion, but that doesn't mean that we don't have our opinions on the specs. Besides, once something is widely used in either Gnome or KDE, for maximal compatibility, we must follow them no matter it's a good design or not otherwise we'll have compatibility issues with applications from Gnome or KDE projects. So this could make a false sense of wide acceptance. We support those specs because we need to provide the users maximized compatibility, not because we think the spec is good. Unfortunately, once something is already widely used in KDE or Gnome, it's hard to fix since it's already widely used and any change could break backward compatibility. So, if the process of spec development is going to be changed, I hope there could be more chance for smaller projects other than Gnome and KDE to get involved. Otherwise xdg could easily develops some specs which only work well for Gnome and KDE, and not for others. Then things couldn't be really 'cross-desktop' because 'cross-desktop' never equals 'supported by Gnome + KDE'. No matter what will be the final spec-forming process, we, LXDE developers, are willing to be involved. Thank you all for reading this. _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
