[Easytag-mailing] A weekend of EasyTAG hacking, and a request for review

[David King <amigadave amigadave com>]

Hi EasyTAG hackers!

I spent the weekend hacking on EasyTAG, with the intent of updating the 
build system to be a bit nicer. I got a little carried away and went 
through the codebase applying fixes and modernisations. I pushed my 
results to github:

https://github.com/amigadave/easytag/compare/autotools

Unfortunately, I was not aware of Santtu Lakkala's great work on porting 
EasyTAG to GTK+ 3 before I started, but it was a very fun weekend 
nonetheless. :-)

The main difference in my branch compared to Santtu's is that I did not 
work on GTK+ 3 porting at all yet; my goal was just to modernise the use 
of GTK+ 2 throughout EasyTAG so that a future GTK+ 3 port would be 
easier. My branch depends on GTK+ 2.24, which seems reasonable as it was 
released in January 2011, and it makes the future GTK+ 3 changes quite a 
bit easier. I also made the build process depend on newer versions of 
automake and autoconf, but I dropped the dependency on libtool. I added 
a dependency on intltool for the internationalisation support, as it 
makes the build process easier than using the old (and now deprecated) 
GLib gettext macros.

Even though I split the changes into smaller commits, there is still a 
lot of code churn, and I have not reached a point where I am completely 
satisfied. There are still many compiler warnings which need fixing 
(although I did fix a few in passing) and browsing through the whole 
codebase I came across some rather questionable code! I will hopefully 
have some more time to work on my branch, especially over Christmas, 
with the intent of adding GTK+ 3 support and making some incremental 
improvements, so I would appreciate some review from others, who are 
likely more experienced with the EasyTAG codebase than myself. I think 
it is best that discussions are on the mailing list rather than on the 
commits in github, as I am likely to rebase the branch every now and 
again, and the mailing list is archived and more visible.

Thanks

--
http://amigadave.com/