Re: gnome desktop integration library

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 13:45 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> > This has never made sense to me - what would be not able to go in gtk or 
> > other appropriate lib? There just isn't anything. I'd say the definition 
> > of gtk is an API for writing GUI apps. So if something is usually needed 
> > to write GUI apps, gtk should have it, or something is busted.
> >
> > http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley breaks out these "B" and "C" 
> > categories of X or GNOME specific stuff; I don't think that is a good 
> > way to break it down. If a general-purpose app really needs particular 
> > functionality, gtk has to provide some way for the app to do it, 
> > cross-platform or not. There's a gdk/gdkx.h for a reason, and the file 
> > selector can backend to gnome-vfs for a reason.
>
> There's no reason to have a library separate to GTK+.  I agree with
> that.  We do need to consolidate the gnome-ish stuff into GTK+ proper.
>
> However, we need to *finally* bite the bullet and do something about the
> two big problems in the base platform:  GConf and Gnome-VFS.  We haven't
> put them under the GTK+ umbrella for semi-good reasons which turn out to
> be semi-bad excuses in the end (sucky API?  clean it up already!  not
> documented?  write the goddamn docs!  CORBA?  do you even care that it
> is an implementation detail?).
>
> [I hate myself for having had to add a custom way to save settings to
> GtkFileChooser, and that way is *not* GConf simply because I can't use
> it.  And I definitely hate having to maintain both GtkFileSystemGnomeVFS
> (the one I care about), and GtkFilesystemUnix (for the three people who
> want to run GTK+ by itself).]
>
> [This is also a good excuse to start deprecating the POSIX-y stuff in
> Gnome-VFS, leaving in place only the meaty stuff like
> GnomeVFSVolumeMonitor, the URL-mangling utilities, etc.]

I think GConf (and Windows registry) and Gnome-vfs should definitely be 
abstracted in glib in some manner.

It would be nice if this could be done in conjunction with the 
portland/freedesktop guys so it could easily allow other filesystems and 
config systems to be used as a backend (which would probably default to 
POSIX and ini files respectively).

Bear in mind XFCE also uses gtk so I dont think for example directly 
exposing Gnome-vfs would be a good idea (they already have their own 
simpler vfs).


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/