Re: Rise of the Plugins

[Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra alumnos utalca cl>]

Hey Vincent,

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 18:26 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> UI and code sharing
> ===================
> Every time a new module is getting the plugin love, I'm seeing this:
> "I
> stole the gedit/epiphany code and integrated it". Wow. Copy and paste?
> Would it be possible to share all this code in a library? (maybe it's
> not, I don't know: I didn't look at that code)
> 
> Also, each module is having its own plugin/extension manager dialog,
> and
> they are all looking the same, but with small variations. Wouldn't it
> make sense to standardize this? Again, maybe a library could help.
> 
> (And in the future, we might want to get some "update the extensions
> from the internet" feature, and we don't want to implement this ten
> times, do we?)

Plugin infrastructure is not the only place in the current GNOME
architecture where this happens. Evince, Epiphany, and now the Eye of
GNOME have all an internal copy of an "editable toolbar", which also
lives in libegg (a library we all want to avoid linking to). This brings
some problems regarding bug fixing we all know: once a bug is fixed in a
copy, it's hard to make the fix land in all the other copies around (see
bug #435614 [1] for a recent example of this).

The "error message area" widget used by EOG (trunk), gedit, epiphany,
and probably more applications, is other place where I'd like to see
more consistency. Maybe this is something worth to be part of GTK+.

Claudio

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435614

-- 
Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra alumnos utalca cl>