GWeather refactoring

[Philip Langdale <philipl mail utexas edu>]

Hi all,

As some people may be aware, I started work on a weather applet for
Maemo (Nokia 770) last week. I decided to use gweather as the basis for
this work because it has a working info retrieval backend and because
it didn't have any unmet dependencies on the device except for
libpanelapplet which I wouldn't need. (It turns out that gnome-vfs on
the device is a second class citizen for remote operations, so I look
forward to seeing James' http work go in).

To do this efficiently, I needed to refactor the backend code out to
avoid a massive copy-paste mess. Also, as there need to be two separate
front ends on the device (the small applet and a separate application
to show the details), there is an additional need there.

I also decided that the gconf prefs handling code should be a separate
lib from the actual retrieval backend because it seems excessive to
introduce this dependency on someone who wants to use the retrieval
backend but not use gconf for prefs.

So, I have checked my changes in (without any maemo specific parts) on
the GWEATHER_REFACTOR branch of gnome-applets, so I'd like to work on
getting it reviewed and merged to HEAD now.

In the larger picture, I think it's worth discussing whether the
gweather lib(s) should be moved out of gnome-applets as a standalone
package. It is obviously hard for someone to build the maemo stuff if
the lib is part of gnome-applets which won't 'configure' successfully
in the maemo dev environment. I currently have changes in my private
tree that add a configure option to make this work but I suspect that
that would be a bit silly to merge back - but if people think it's fine,
I can do that.

The changes are pretty straightforward and I've put detailed ChangeLog
entries in, so if you checkout the branch and take a look, it should all
be clear. I humbly feel that it looks nicer than it did before, but I
won't suggest that it's perfect by any stretch, so let me know what you
think.

Thanks,

--phil