Christian Schaller has written a summary of his time at GUADEC
2. It’s a lengthy diary of events, with some encouraging news on
continued discussions between KDE and GNOME developers on
interoperability between the two environments.
“The second day of GUADEC was called interoperability
day and many of the sessions were dedicated to GNOME/KDE
interoperability and friendship. One of the presentations was on
the aRts sound server which as many of you know is the default
sound-server for KDE 2.0 and which will probably also be included
in GNOME 2.0. Myself and all the GStreamer people attended that in
order to get some input on aRts and CSL, since in addition to being
a sound-server also has some of the same aims as the GStreamer
project. Stefan Westerfeld’s talk was interesting and gave a nice
introduction to artsd.Later that day Erik and Wim did their GStreamer presentation
which I really looked forward to. Thanks to some great work by
Richard Boulton we already had support artsd in GStreamer so Erik
and Wim made sure to put outputting to artsd as an example of
supported output into their presentation. BTW, for those confused
by my use of the term artsd, it is that the name of the sound
server component of aRts.During the day there were also some GNOME/KDE hacker meetings to
try to make some co-operation headway. I was not a participant in
these meetings (since they where only for the core people), but I
did hear about some of the results of them. Before you read on I
must tell you that most of this is hearsay, which means it isn’t
firsthand information and may be incorrect or it might be something
which was talked about but not resolved, so please read it with
that in mind. Ok, well from what I managed to piece together from
talking with people and surmise from Havoc Pennington’s end keynote
it seems that they managed to build a really friendly atmosphere.
Mattias Ettrich had talked about trying to give Qt and GTK+ a more
common look during his keynote and I heard that this was something
that they seemed to agree upon, which means that in the future the
default look of GTK+ and Qt might be more similar. This can be
changed by themes of course but ‘out of the box’ GTK+ and Qt will
probably look more alike in the future.”