On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, James Ots wrote:

Hi,

I think it would be really nice if the KDE file dialogues could be put back into inkscape as a compile-time option, like in sodipodi. I can cope with the rest of inkscape being gtk (I don't like it, but I can cope!), but KDE's file dialogues are just too nice to go without.

Hi James,

Thanks for the feedback on the removal of the KDE file dialog. You're certainly right that the KDE file dialog is tons better than the GNOME one. As a KDE fan myself, we'd discussed the possibility of switching to Qt prior to forming the project, as well as cross-platform widgetsets like wxWindows, but reached a concensus that staying the course with Gtk/Gtkmm and striving for good GNOME compliance would be one of the groundrules for the project.

Along with that, we also set as a groundrule to try to reduce the size of the codebase, as we felt that at over 100k lines it was getting a bit unweildy to maintain. We felt that by dropping chunks of code that were not used by default (or not used at all), we'd help achieve that aim.

The KDE file dialog kind of stood out to us like a sore thumb; two different file dialogs means two dialogs to need to maintain and support. And even though it is just a single piece of KDE, it still requires a number of KDE-isms in makefiles, extra configs, and attention to another set of dependencies. Removing this one thing lets us clean out a good bit of extraneous logic from the build process and codebase.

Anyway, sorry for the long winded explanation but the question deserves a full answer. We are committing to keep the codebase purely Gtk/Gtkmm so won't be adding the support for the KDE file dialog back in.

In theory, the Right Thing To Do would be to create a KDE-like file dialog for Gtkmm, and work to get it accepted into GNOME, as that'd solve this problem not just for Inkscape but for all GNOME applications. It's a bit beyond Inkscape's scope, but I'd think in general we'd all support that kind of effort if someone wanted to undertake it.

Bryce