KDE: What a monster!

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:36:22 +0100 (CET), Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:
> "programming environment"? what do you mean?

Some "heler application" for integration and managing source
files, such as KDevelop, Eclipse or the like.



> unix itself is THE BEST (tm) programming environment i've ever seen, with 
> most powerfull project manager called make(1), plus LOTS of tools to 
> automatize most of other things.

I've already recognized this fact. I've tried out KDevelop and
Eclipse. Well, fine, they may have their users, but I've not
gotten one of them. To me, text-file based controls are the
best solution. Multiple X Terminals or screen sessions give me
the speed and power to do my development work.

And finally, I've found Makefile to be even a good tool for
web design. Hm? What? Yes, exactly, or to be more precise,
not... I do use it to implement "developer-site SSI replacement",
for uploading content (make upload) and similar tasks. It's
possible! :-)

I have a system to automatize writing of applications for a
job (printed output and PDF for e-mail) based on a config
file, and then a Makefile to create the tex file from it,
and all the other targets.

The advantage to automate things is one of the reasons that
drove me away from those X based development tools. There's
simply too much interaction for nothing.



> of course - not everybody likes to "waste" few hours to fully understand 
> things, get "cool" "trendy" "programming environment" and then waste few 
> hours every day.

If you have a concept for programming (and as a part of it,
implementing source code), you're well off with every tool that
fits your needs. The most clicky-colorful X environment doesn't
help if you can't program.

Trying to falsify this condition, there are many tools for web
developers that output something that's not HTML, claiming that
you don't need to know anything about the Web, HTML, the computer
or anything in life, but everyone can be a web developer (and
see "Flash" for such reasons, too). I think this "click & done"
attitude is found in the programming world, too, but because
programming isn't cool enough (not as cool as web development),
there are not so much causes from these tools, except what some
"script kiddies" do produce. :-)



> classic unix programs as so flexible that it's often usable for things 
> they were not supposed to.

As I introduced above. Hey, in the past I even abused a floppy tape
drive to play music from QIC tapes. :-)



> For example - i use make and C preprocessor to make webpages :)
>
> instead of all this .css i use headers where i define all colors font 
> sizes etc.

CSS isn't that bad, my most use of make and cc is #include with
HTMLPP=cpp -C -P -traditional, and ftp -u ftp://$(FTPUSER):$(FTPPASSWD)@$(SERVER) *
for the "make upload" command. Even "make deinstall" (to clean it
from the web server) is possible, how would you do this if
printf "prompt\nmdelete *\nbye\n" | ftp ftp://$(FTPUSER):$(FTPPASSWD)@$(SERVER)/
wasn't possible? :-)



> i want to change colors on all pages - just one line in one file
> and run make

Possible with CSS, too, as long as read from a file (no inline
CSS).



> so why don't you revert to old software?

Impossible. For example, XFree86 -> xorg dependencies. What I
can still use (e. g. xpdf package, LaTeX, xmms) is still in use
here.



> > believe. Evolution is good, but what if it's not only about
> > adding, fixing and optimizing things, but making things impossible,
> 
> why do you use evolution? i installed it once, started once and after 
> being shocked how crappy it is i deinstalled it.

Misunderstanding: I didn't mean Evolution, the e-mail and other
things managmement program, I meant evolution, the Charles Darwin
thing. :-)

I tested the e-mail Evolution once, found it MUCH too complicated
and kept using fetchmail + sylpheed.



> text mode mail clients are the best, like mutt, alpine etc.

Yes, pine was my first working mail client. What I liked most about
text mode clients was that I could access them from everywhere just
by the means of a SSH application.



> > Before I will start, I may say that I often heared that "KDE is
> > an excellent development platform", so I tried it out,
> 
> from whom ? :) KDE is unless

>From KDE users. :-)



> > especially because of KDEvelop which I found quite interesting
> > (running it without KDE). KDE and Gnome are simply too much
> > for my machine - end for me. So much stuff I don't need and
> 
> believe me, there are NO BETTER development platform than standard unix 
> tools

Let me emphasize your use of "standard" here. Because I did use
many differnt platforms (BSD, Linux, Solaris, even IRIX and HP-UX),
I found it quite comfortable that with the means of basic (not
BASIC) knowledge you could do development on all the platforms
in their installed state, no need to install X-based DE tools.
This is due to the fact that all the UNIXes and Linusi share
essential standards, such as standard scripting shells, standard
ways of organizing things and standard ways of accessing files
or devices.



> > First I found that compiling lasts much longer. I know that the
> 
> yes gcc gets slower.
> 
> anyway - i don't compile kernel and FreeBSD every day.
> 
> something like every year is closer.

Yes, same here, too. Setup once, the use. This is one of the
first things I do right after installation: configure a kernel
that exactly represents the existing hardware and does only
contain what's needed.

As I said, I may add some new complaining: In the past, I
always had these lines in my kernel config:

	options         SC_DFLT_FONT
	makeoptions     SC_DFLT_FONT=iso
	options         ATKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP
	makeoptions     ATKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP=german.iso
	options         UKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP
	makeoptions     UKBD_DFLT_KEYMAP=german.iso

This allowed me to have a german keyboard layout even in SUM.
But it stopped working with 7.0.



> > Now for X. The startup of X has been "improved" over
> > the startup of XFree86. It now lasts almost 10s from "startx"
> > to X. Launching WindowMaker needs no more than 1s of this
> > time. But sadly, X cannot run 1400x1050 anymore. Autodetect
> 
> X -configure
> then edit xorg.conf manually. that's all.

That's what I did. If I setup things like with XFree86, the
whole system stopps working, even if I force a vertain mode
with Option "PreferredMode" "1400x1050". The xrandr workaround
is simply the only thing that works, allthough it might be the
reason for other problems (wine).



> well you wrote so much i would need to spend a bit time to read it all.

Session suspended. We'll continue another time. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...