Re: gnome desktop integration library

[Carlos Garnacho <carlosg gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 22:56 +0200, Chipzz wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > Why can't gtk depend on dbus? How do those reasons not apply to libgnome?
> >
> > I don't know, I'm asking. But there's no reason to just make an
> > assumption up front that gtk can't depend on dbus, or that gnome should.
> 
> Because gtk+ is not just gnome. Gtk+ is also maemo. Gtk+ is also xfce.
> Gtk+ is also a possible choice for embedded apps on phones, pdas, and
> stuff like that. Gtk+ is also a library for very simple apps, where
> very tight desktop integration does not make sense.

Not only that, Gtk+ has been the toolkit of choice for other thousands
of third party developers [1], why? my guess is that many of them
thought Gtk+ was reasonably lightweight and reasonably easy. If we make
Gtk+ depend on a several times bigger set of dependencies, we'll be
scaring away lots of people.

Gtk+ is a toolkit to make graphic applications, it must provide the
necessary reusable elements to make this an easy task, and IMHO it does
it greatly, and project Ridley is making it even better by including
stuff that was wrongly included higher in the stack.

But introducing lots of (somewhat unrelated) stuff in Gtk+ just because
we think "who wouldn't need a ...?" feels like the wrong approach for
me. Regarding the libgnome-whatever, having a specific library to get
integration for the desktop would be very welcome by many people, of
course the current libgnome has been a mistake, but I'm sure that many
people here has learnt from the past errors to let them happen again :).

	Regards


[1] Don't have numbers really, but I bet that the amount of apps in
Debian using Gtk+ is HUGE