Re: Consolidating Core Desktop libraries

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 22:33 +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:

> There is a lot of code which is copy-pasted around our desktop. For
> example, the GsdOsdWindow class, used by gnome-settings-daemon and
> gnome-power-manager, had to be updated several times because of Gtk
> breakages.
> Another piece of copy-pasted code is gdmuser, which lives in
> gnome-panel, gdm and gnome-shell, and is constantly being updated
> because of accountsservice instability.
> 
> Then there are microlibraries, killing which would help performance.
> These include for example libgtop, libgweather and libgnomekbd, but also
> liboobs if the system tool backends are not dead.
> I can't find an use for them outside core desktop, while on the other
> hand there are already core desktop packages that depend on them.

I'd say no, as I think you mix quite different things here. Libraries
such as libgtop and libgweather already have no API guarantees, and have
never been part of the core desktop, so I can't really see the benefit
of mixing them all into a single giant module (not counting the
coordination issues you might have in a library module with dozens of
completely different submodules, each one with a different maintainer
and so on).

It might be useful instead to create a shared libgnome-core-kitchen-sink
library for those widgets or useful pieces of code that are shared
across multiple core desktop components but are "not generic enough" to
go into the platform; but we should also make it very clear that such a
library should not be used by applications outside of the core desktop,
otherwise we have another libgnome/libgnome-ui which we tried really
hard to get rid of in the last years :)

Cheers,

Cosimo