Wine Front-End development

[Karl Lattimer]

> [. . .]
> 
> I think that this discussion has really degenerated into a long advocacy 
> *against* everything that open source is good for.
> 
> Alexandre's take seems to be that one should simply ignore what's out there 
> and program like in Win 2.x days. In the meantime, software has moved forward 
> quite a bit. That's what I make out of it.

snip

> Doing it in "plain C and Win32" implies reimplementing all this otherwise 
> irrelevant stuff. It shifts focus from the goal to the means, by having to 
> develop your own tools. E.g. C++ library is just a tool (means) that helps 
> you to write your application (the goal). I just don't get the argument that 
> developing a contemporary GUI application should be done such that all the 
> tools have to be redone from scratch, as that's what Alexandre's way of doing 
> things implies. 

here! here!

Thank you!

Shifting the "goal to the means" is what I meant by;

'These issues may serve to deter a developer from taking on the project
with a view to "I'm not getting my hands on that train wreck".'

It seems lunacy to ignore tools which are available in favor of a non
existent accepted "Alexandre doesn't want it" rhetoric, I always thought
open source was about community, and discussing the advantages of one
language over another is irrelevant when it comes down to the fact in
about 2 weekends worth of actual work I have a nice looking well rounded
app, which is well on its way to the full functionality _I_ want out of
it, regardless of any other users. I am of course releasing it GNU GPL
so others have the benefit of this. I don't know any C win32 programmers
which could do what I've done so far in ~380 lines of python.

Lets remember that open source is about, sharing and freedom, sharing
ideas as well as software, and giving people freedom to put their own
contributions in, and use software how they like. It is not about
restricting what functionality is available to users by restricting the
programmers. Remember please that the dependencies of pygtk/pyglade do
not influence the core of wine, they aren't important to the internals
and have no affect on it whatsoever. In this respect it is a completely
different animal to fontforge.

I would like wine doors to be included in the wine distribution, but
that is not to say I think its necessary. Think of, file-roller. This
tool doesn't come bundled with tar, rar, zip, bzip and gzip. It is
merely a user interface which uses these tools.

As far as I'm concerned the only thing I want out of the wine community
is a series of enhancements and changes to the AppDB in order to provide
the functionality I need for my application. Once I have some semblance
of an application ready for distribution I will then download the source
to the AppDB make the changes myself and hopefully get those changes
accepted into CVS and eventually onto the site. However if this fails to
occur then I will fund out of my own pocket a server and the other
resources necessary to run this service in the hopes that wine users
will contribute financially to ensure its survival.

K,