Re: GApplication is going away

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 15:47 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> Define "this cycle".

GNOME 2.32 as it will be released in September.

> I see a lot of details about it going away, but at no point do I see
> anything about _why_. It was discussed, implemented, then used by
> applications. Why the sudden change of heart? What did we do wrong in
> the process that we need to remove it and replace it now?

The old API has some warts and significant limitations.  In particular,
we wanted to address these issues:

 - the weirdness of a constructor that sometimes exit()s your program

 - actions can't have parameters

 - GApplication as it stands is incapable of implementing the mockups we
   saw for the shell -- its support for putting actions on the
   application menu is extremely limited

 - the "gedit as $EDITOR" use case

 - the way that application lifecycle was defined was not sufficiently
   flexible

 - it didn't do some things that almost every app would want to have
   done for it

 - the missed chance to implement the "use dbus to launch apps" ability

 - etc.

The decision to change the API was made by Colin, Emmanuele and myself.

Cheers