Re: gnome desktop integration library



On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 10:50 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> I think you and Havoc agree on everything, *except* for "what stuff can
> GTK+ depend on?".

To me, this question gets down to 'what is GTK+ being designed for?'

Right now, there are three major uses for GTK+:

* the GNOME Desktop toolkit (rich desktop experience)
* a cross-platform toolkit (LCD approach)
* an embedded platform (pick-and-choose)

Right now, GTK+ is walking a delicate balance between these three
things.  There are some features that work in the first case, but not
the other two (such as the proposed 'Open With...' dialog).  Since we
can't quite resolve it or don't have the time to do the work to handle
all worlds.

Other features have been stuck on implementation details.  In principle,
something like gconf would work as a dependency for all three; in
practice (as has been brought up by Havoc many times) it doesn't, so we
continually fudge it.  gnome-vfs is in a similar situation.  GtkPrint
ended up taking extra time to write because the print dialog had to be
written twice, for both the cross-platform case (windows) and the GNOME
case.

I don't know if we want to keep doing platform-jujitsu to keep this
balance, or try something more drastic.  I do think that the current
approach isn't going to keep working.  The embedded companies are using
GTK+-2.6, we're still using xsettings in GTK+ to avoid gconf, and
gnome-vfs still gives people the willies.

Thanks,
-Jonathan

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