Re: bookmark management and other code reuse

[Ricardo Fernández Pascual <ric users sourceforge net>]

El mié, 23 de 04 de 2003 a las 22:18, Marius Andreiana escribió:
> There are several gnome applications which implement bookmark management
> ( galeon, ephiphany, nautilus, gftp, yelp ). The degree of usability and
> functionality varies from great ( galeon ) to very bad ( gftp ) and
> planning ( yelp ). I don't know how it is in ephiphany.
>
> I think the galeon bookmarks code is completely separated from main
> code, need to check this. I suggest to the other application developers
> to use that too. I CC'ed gftp author, yelp already has a bug with this.
> 
> 
I wrote galeon's bookmark code. It is totally separated from galeon's
code, to the point that you can already build the bookmark editor as a
separate program (it is called testbookmarks). The bookmarks menus and
toolbars are also reusable independently of galeon.

All bookmark code lives in a separate directory and builds as a static
lib, totally independent.

The ui is also quite separated from the rest of the bookmark code. It
has a custom GtkTreeModel implementation for the editor and it uses a
model-view separation everywhere. It uses gobjects (specially signals)
heavily to accomplish this.

I haven't looked at epiphany bookmarks code recently. I don't know why
they decided to rewrite everything just to change the UI. In my opinion,
they could have got the same effect using the same internals, but they
didn't asked me and it's theirs code.... 

> The idea to provide some independent code from one project it's very
> good ( galeon bookmarks, ephiphany toolbar, libgaim from gaim ). It
> would be great if re-using that code would not simply be done by
> copy-pasting code ( and then forget of the parent project ) but rather
> include it as it is and from time to time re-sync it from the parent
> project ( adding dependencies would reduce the code amount but create a
> maintenance nightmare ).

I don't think that a shared lib for bookmarks is a good idea. I have no
problems sharing code.


> So, to the developers who separate and reuse code this way, thank you!
> It's more effort, but it has the most benefits in the long run.
> 
> What are the problems you are facing with this? Is 'not made here' a big
> issue?

I don't think that changing the bookmark system of galeon is an option
now. It already works and is a lot of work. 


-- 
Ricardo Fernández Pascual
ric users sourceforge net
Murcia. España.