[g-a-devel] ATK API addition + deprecation

[Fernando Herrera <fherrera onirica com>]

Hi All,

As discussed on the meeting today I would like to propose an API
addition to ATK.

Rationale: the current "text-changed" signal (that includes
text-changed::insert and text-changed::delete)  in Atk includes only
the offset and the length of the text insert/removed. The mapped
at-spi event includes the inserted/deleted text, so the bridge needs
to get that text. For atk implementations that fires the event async
(like Gecko 2.0 of Java) the actual text has been already changed when
the bridge queries that text.

Proposal: Add 3 new signals "text-insert", "text-remove" and
"text-update" including offset, lenght and text params. We would mark
as deprecated the old "text-changed" signal.

Impact: We won't break API or ABI. The bridge would need to be updated
to handle these new signals, and map to the proper at-spi events (I
think we don't have text-update on at-spi). AT applications wouldn't
need to be changed and would get at-spi text-changed event with proper
details. Atk Implementations could switch from the old signal to the
new if they require the newest Atk version including those signals, or
can have code to deal with different atk versions on runtime (query if
the new signals are available).

Another API change that I would like to propose is related to
text-selection::changed as currently it does not include start nor end
offset, so we could have in a similar way text-selection-added,
text-selection-removed and text-selection-updated, including the
selection number, start and end offsets as parameters.

So what do you think?

Any other additions we may want to have for GNOME 3 before the API freeze?

Of course as discussed during the meeting we should try to do a more
deep API update for gtk4 (this time breaking things!).

Thanks!

Salu2