Re: ANN: Frescobaldi 2.0.4

[David Kastrup]

Valentin Villenave <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/3/11 Janek Warchoł <address@hidden>:
>> Thanks and happy birthday to you!  Frescobaldi is great!
>
> Yeah, I'm still not entirely convinced by the KDE-less version (in a
> couple months we should discuss it in the Report :-).

Should improve portability.  For me, KDE is a non-starter.  I once
compared using Emacs (with AUCTeX, preview-latex and lots of other
stuff) as a TeX shell with a "bare-bones no-nonsense" KDE application, I
think Kile (or whatever it was called at that time).  It turned out that
just starting the KDE application had about three times the memory
footprint of a full Emacs session with various directory edits,
graphical previews and several source files and stuff.

Three times.  Because it started all sorts of daemons.  And its private
footprint alone was comparable to that of Emacs.

That's the sort of baggage you don't want to be dragging around
unnecessarily.  It is a tradeoff that might be ok if your main work
environment is KDE anyway, but it makes an application uninteresting
when this is not the case.

I don't know what kind of functionality hit the removal of the KDE
dependency carried with it.  But as a step for increasing the user base,
feasible platforms and overall appeal, this was certainly a good
strategic choice.

And it is not likely the KDE users will now jump ship and use some other
application instead.

I still need to do a lot of other stuff before I can tackle Emacs
support of LilyPond again.

-- 
David Kastrup