On Wednesday 14 Jun 2017 12:35:12 Timothy Pearson wrote:
> We need to plan out a roadmap to determine whether or not we should be
> trying to get e.g. GTK3 into a form we can use as the backend and common
> interface to third party programs like LibreOffice.

I would recommend avoiding the use of any version of GTK, (if TDE R14.0.4 does 
not depend on GTK), because it might cause more problems than it solves.  I 
have just done a test of GEdit from Debian 8.7, (as a representative gtk+3.0 
application), in TDE R14.0.4, and there are several issues.

I expected to see the very clumsy and awkward Gnome/GTK system for resizing 
windows by dragging their borders, but instead, I saw the nice KDE/TDE system.  
This appears to be because TDE puts its own border right round the GEdit 
window.  But this comes at a price.  The GEdit window now has two title bars: 
the TDE title bar, and below that, what is presumably the GEdit title bar, 
which takes a lot of space to repeat the filename, for no useful purpose.  This 
GEdit title bar is about twice the height of the TDE title bar.

I very often tile two windows one above the other, for example a spreadsheet 
and a text file, in order to note down results from the spreadsheet in the text 
file.  For speed and convenience, the data areas of both windows need to be as 
high as possible, and wasting window height with the GEdit title bar would be 
a significant nuisance if I used GEdit.

GEdit has no menu bar and no toolbar!  In contrast to that, in KEdit, the menu 
bar and toolbar fit in a vertical space that is only slightly larger than the 
GEdit title bar, and in KEdit, I can hide or show the toolbar and/or statusbar 
in a moment from the Settings menu, if I need more vertical space.

Instead of a menu bar and toolbar, the GEdit title bar has a button for a file 
open dialogue, a peculiar button that a tooltip indicates is to create a new 
file, a Save button, and a button with three horizontal lines on it, which 
drops down a primitive menu, which looks roughly like a truncated or merged 
form of some of the items from the menus in the KEdit menu bar.

The GEdit file open dialogue initially shows no files at all, and you have to 
click on the Other Documents ... button at the bottom, to get a file picker.  
And if you don't like the file picker in LibreOffice, this one is far worse.  It 
is basically the same as the LibreOffice file picker, but WITHOUT the field where 
you can paste in the name of the required file, as in the trick to open a file 
fast in LibreOffice, which I described in another message in this thread.  So in 
my home directory with 8804 files and directories, I just get those 8804 files 
and directories in a vertical list, which I have to comb through to find the 
required file, and there is no short cut.

So I would strongly recommend continuing the present TDE policy, (if I 
understand it correctly), of maintaining support for important third party 
programs, by wrapping new versions of Qt as they appear.  Or of using the TQt 
layer to enable Qt 3 and Qt 4 both to be installed on the same system without 
symbol conflicts, if that is how it works.  If TDE R14.0.4 does not depend on 
GTK, I think introducing some sort of dependence on GTK would be unlikely to 
provide any net benefits, and it might introduce a lot of trouble.

I don't think there's any need for a TDE backend and common interface to third 
party programs.  The important ones, such as LibreOffice and Firefox, work 
perfectly without any help.  That's also true for other programs I use a lot, 
such as TeXmacs.

As a general comment, in my installation of TDE R14.0.4 in Debian 8.7, 
everything important seems to work extremely well.  I can use the best of 
KDE4, (such as Okular, the pdf viewer), alongside favourites from KDE 3.5, 
such as KEdit and Kasablanca, all in the very nice TDE desktop.  And third 
party programs like LibreOffice and Firefox work perfectly.  It's great.

Do I understand correctly, that in my installation of TDE R14.0.4 in Debian 
8.7, what is really happening is that I have Qt version 4.8.6 running in the 
background, and Trinity Qt (TQt) is wrapping that, so that it looks like Qt 3 
to the Trinity desktop and the KDE 3.5 apps?

Or do I actually have BOTH Qt 3 and Qt 4 installed, and the main benefit of the 
TQt layer is to resolve the Qt3 and Qt4 symbol collisions when Qt4 is 
installed alongside Qt3?  (That is what 
https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Understanding_the_TQT_Interface seems to say.)

Is being able to use Qt4 applications in TDE, like I am, something that was 
not actually planned, but works anyway, due to the TQt layer?

Whichever way it works, it is great at the moment, and I hope it will 
continue.  I'm a bit afraid that introducing dependence on GTK could damage 
TDE, and provide no real benefits.

Chris