Re: gnome desktop integration library

[JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>]

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 19:15 +0200, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> Il giorno mar, 05/09/2006 alle 16.43 +0200, Rodrigo Moya ha scritto:
> > Hi
> > 
> > The number of libraries in the GNOME platform (official or not) is too
> > high, IMO. And, for the integration of SLED10's slab thing into
> > control-center that we're working on (subscribe to gnomecc-list if you
> > want to participate in the discussion, please), we need to add two more
> > libraries.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > So, what do people think? should we start merging -menus and -desktop
> > into this library?
> 
> As others have already said, a gnome-integration library which allows a
> situation where a typical gnome application would depend on something
> like glib, gtk, and gnome-integration-library getting rid of the legacy
> libs like libgnome, libgnomeui, libbonobo etc is a good idea.
> 
> However I think we should be careful in creating a new 'catch all'
> library and repeat errors made in the past: why should all the gnome
> programs depend on a gnome-menu library or on an applets api when 99% of
> them don't need it?

Because its a shared library, its not that big of a deal.  You don't
selectively link to other platform libraries like win32 afaik, you just
get the whole thing.  Plus, having it all in one (or just a few)
libraries encourages people to use other parts of it for better
integration.

> As already seen with libgnome another problem with putting heterogeneus
> stuff in a single lib is that if something in it is replaced/deprecated
> we have to keep it around forever... e.g. all gnome apps still
> indirectly use libbonoboui even if they don't need it because of
> GnomeApp etc in libgnomeui.

So either we have this exact danger moving the Ridley stuff lower in the
stack (like into gtk and glib) or we've learned more about how to select
our APIs and functionality, which is I think the case, lessening the
danger of another libgnome/libgnomeui situation.

-JP
-- 
JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>
Novell, Inc.