Re: Eog port

[Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra igalia com>]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 09:43:03PM +0200, Fabian Sturm wrote:
> 
> > This is my take on this. Right now, or at any point in time, the last
> > thing eog needs is to be rewritten to another language because it
> > seems to be simpler. I've seen such energetic efforts before in the
> > past and usually they are motivated by inexperience.
> 
> No they are motivated out of curiosity. In my case I also wanted to learn vala and see
> how far one can get with it. My day job is to program in C++ for the last 6 years.
> So maybe it's just the pain I feal every day and I wanted to do something more enjoyable :-)
> 
> > This can only lead to frustration once you realize it's not that simple.
> 
> In this case the realization was fortunately the other way round. It is actually quite
> simple. It only is time consuming...

I'm actually talking about the frustration of accepting at some point
that the project you started rewriting won't necessarily accept your
code.

> 
> > But rewriting anything before thinking exactly what's that the GNOME
> > image viewer should be, would probably be a waste of effort.
> 
> I don't want to add insult to injury but Gnome is right now in a massive rewrite with Gnome3
> itself so I think it is the perfect time to also rewrite one of the last stable programs ;-)

You can call GNOME 3 a rewrite, but it is one that was done with a
goal in mind other than "let's just rewrite this in a different
language because it seems simpler". It also happened with all parts
involved from day 0.

> 
> No you don't need any library changes. You only need to write a vapi file which describes the C interface. 
> And you only need to map the functions that you are using. So it should not be a lot of work 
> for the libraries which are missing a vapi file.
> 
> So the big question is now how to go forward with this? Should this be continued?
> 
> What I am currently doing is to apply all changes between eog-2.32 and eog-3.2.
> After that I'll start the bugfixing once again.

This is exactly one of the reasons why this approach is wrong. By the
time you're done, you could eventually need to start applying the
changes between 3.2 and HEAD, and so on. Why not start discussing what
a modern image viewer should be like and decide from there whether we
need a full rewrite or not?

Please don't take me wrong, but I appreciate your enthusiasm and I
would feel much better about it if we could use it in a more
productive way.

Claudio