Re: gnome desktop integration library

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
[...]
> But as an app developer, how do I decide whether I want to do that? Do 
> we need two versions of every app, one that "tightly integrates" and one 
> that does not? Why can't the library figure this out for me?
>
> As an app developer I'd say I clearly want to _both_ tightly integrate, 
> _and_ be cross platform, _and_ have only solid, stable dependencies. I 
> don't want to choose among these things.

I cant agree with you more, who needs this bussiness of littering thier
codebase with "#ifdef HAVE_GNOME" just to provide a couple of extra add-on
fringe features that supposedly "integrate well" - at the cost of having
a dual build to maintain - ugh the pain.

I think that right now - people might feel the need to have a "libgnome"
that has all that extra crap that people might need in some fringe case
to integrate well with gnome, but realisticly that will never happen.

Why ? because as soon as something is adequately stable and usefull in
that library - it will probably wind up in gtk+, leaving us eventually with
the mostly depricated spaghetti we know today as libgnomeui.

I have the feeling that the proposed libgnome may solve some problems
on the immediate front - but essentially in the long run we need:
  - A general purpose UI toolkit / platform library that is GTK+
  - Anything that "logicly" breaks the boundry in a seperate lib
  - We are also sorely in need of a portable ipc for the desktop domain,
    I'm sure the gconf & dbus people are working that out and I'm personally
    unaquianted with any of thier specific issues - what is clear is that
    ultimately this ipc should be accessible from GTK+, regardless of whether
    or not it uses a hard dependancy.

So in summery - my thoughts are that, given we dont have mountains of unlimited
resources to go writing code spikes at leasure, we should completely ignore
whatever short term gains can be achieved by creating more of a mess, and we
should look to the future - find out what functionality belongs in gtk+ and
what functionality belongs in its own seperate lib and eventually do our homework
and hammer it all into place, while this could take years to achive - so could
the writeup of yet another bundle of special-case libgnome... what would you
prefer to have 2 or 3 years down the road ?

My morning 2 cents,
                      -Tristan