[UI] Sheets and Objects dialog

[demurgets free fr]

hi,

I subscribed to this list because I sent a complete mail on the 3td this month
and it still not have been moderated.
I'd like to make a couple of UI enhancements to Dia, and before that, remove the
use of deprecated Gtk widgets.

I started with GtkComboBox and took quite some time to port the Sheets and
Objects dialog located in the File menu.
I stopped halfway to just think if the dialog could be improved first.

So, first things first, I'd like to know the use cases of this dialog:
        - is it useful to customize system sheets? maybe to reduce the number of
shapes?
        - is this to add personal items to them? because the problem is you can add UML
shapes to Network for instance, which just defeats the purpose of the
classification
        - adding new type of sheets? but how to remove them?

This involves a lot of code, including a startup warning dialog if the system
sheet is newer and if you want to overwrite your local customizations.
I'd like to improbe the UI in light of removing deprecated widgets.

So the use cases seem to be:
        - creating custom sheets
        - customizing system sheets
        - adding/removing custom shapes

If I'm not mistaken, customizing system sheets should be ruled-out, even if they
are a lot of items.
Creating custom sheets is nice, but you need to write shape files.

Wouldn't it make it simpler to have:
        - some sort of bookmarks (a la Firefox) lying in this dialog first *and*
accessible from a popup in the palette directly to quickly bookmark an item
        - the bookmarks go in a unique "Custom" sheet (ideally always visible)
        - when you have 1+ bookmark, you automatically get this "Custom" sheet

Anyway what's the point of creating your own sheets if you need .shape files?
That means you'll need to edit XML at some point.
If users want to create sheets, they can edit them using XML, the DTD is simple.
For exchanging sheets, maybe it would be better
to propose an option to import a sheet you got from the Internet for instance.

flames, suggestions, what are your opinion on that?

--Stef