Re: Evince update and release

[Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net>]

Jonathan Blandford wrote:
...
> Once the release is done, I'd like to try to get the properties dialog
> into CVS.  I'm also planning on looking at permissions, if no one else
...
> Is anyone else doing anything interesting?

Last week I spent a good many hours toying with the nautilus properties
page. I got to the point where I have a "PDF" tab that responds to the
PDF mime type and I can put anything in it.

However...

When I refactored the pdf properties patch to placeable into a tab (in
addition to the window used in file->properties menu in evince), I sort
of hit a wall.

The problem is that to use the document properties from evince, you need
to include all of the evdocument dependencies (all of the base code),
etc. To make it work, the .so nautilus extension would essentially need
to have 75% of evince embedded in it. That would make it excessively
large and inefficient.

There are two solutions to this problem:

1. Make all document properties code in evince atomic.
2. Make the nautilus extension access the information via poppler itself.

Number 2 has the most potential. While it would require some code
duplication, the resulting nautilus .so would be small, as it would be
linked against poppler. The glade UI could be reused without any issues.
The biggest maintenance chore would be that any bugfixes and updates
would have to happen in two places.

Of course, Option 1 is also possible, and in the long run it might be a
cleaner solution. The idea is that linking a .o into the nautilus
library is "okay", linking several (especially across directory
boundaries) becomes insanely difficult. Keeping track of the symbols
becomes a big chore. Totem, gstreamer, and nautilus-burn don't have this
problem because they access things from shared libraries almost exclusively.

As you can see, I've given this some thought and tried applying it. I
believe that the nautilus properties page would be a fantastic thing to
have, and I think it might be worth some small amount of code
duplication to achieve this.

I am not terribly familiar with the evince code; it is possible that I
have completely overlooked something.

Any easy-fixes?

--Pat