Re: Thoughts on patch for gcalctool bug #448263

[Don Scorgie <Don Scorgie org>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 07:13 -0700, Rich Burridge wrote:
> Jani Monoses has sent me a nice patch for gcalctool. See:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448263
> specifically the attachment:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=90082&action=view
> 
> "The patch makes the following changes:
> 
> - replace gnome_help_display_desktop() with code from libgnome. As a bonus this
>   made both calls' to help error handling be consistent when by using a dialog.
> - drop GnomeClient dependency which is only used for die callback that does
>   gtk_main_quit() and is useless
> - use gtk_init instead of gnome_program_init. bug-buddy functionality is lost
>   but that does not seem very important for gcalctool. There were few crashers
>   and the last was caught months ago by Ubuntu's apport not bug buddy.
> 
> This patch makes the current --enable-gnome switch redundant as the app becomes
> plain GTK + gconf. On the box I tested it in, the number of linked DSOs dropped
> from 69 to 36 and startup time improved noticeably."
> 
> Now anything that reduces the number of libraries I need to add two
> numbers together from 69 to 36 seems like a fine idea to me, but the
> potential downside is that there is no longer bug-buddy support.
> 
> Does anybody have any strong objections to this patch being committed
> for the gcalctool v2.19.4 release tomorrow.

We're currently working on yelp (really, we are working on it!).  It's
hoped that soon, there will be a mechanism to launch yelp through dbus
and improved the handling of starting through the command line.  This
will have an advantage for modules wanting to drop libgnome.  Yelp will
handle all parsing of uris.  One thing I've been contemplating is how to
handle invalid requests (i.e. asking for a non-installed document).  If
yelp handles it, it simplifies translators lives (as the strings won't
occur in every module) and would improve consistency (error message is
the same every time).  However, would this look out-of-place (i.e. will
the popped up unexpectedly placed)?.

Anyway, not really related to the above (except, that the copied code
may become obsolete in the future).  Just thought I'd mention it for
anyone thinking about it in the future.  At some point, We'll do a
mini-howto on how it'll work once we've got it all sorted.  I'm still
hoping to get all this done in time for 2.20, though no guarantees.

Thanks
Don