[evolution-patches] GAL status

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

> It seems that there is some duplicate work between us. Would you please
> briefly list what you are doing and plan to do? You know that we are now
> working on gal, gtkhtml and evolution. The plan is to make Evolution
> accessible by the end of this year.

On the overall Evolution side of things the current situation is that we
are trying to plan for Evolution 2.0, but we have no idea what we are
doing just yet.

At some point we need to factor the A11Y work into the Evolution 2.0
plan and make place for it in the schedule, but since we don't have a
schedule or requirement list yet, it's probably too early to do that.  I
am keeping it in mind though.  :-)

> Also, where can we get the list of the potentially deprecated parts? So
> that we don't need to work on that. If there is any part that is newly
> introduced, let us know please. Or is there any link to such parts.

Just as a general direction, I think we are going to try to get rid of
the GAL code as much as possible for the future; most of the
functionality of the GAL widgets can be replaced with stock GTK+ stuff
and there is no point in maintaining all that code.

Also, we might be getting rid of the shortcut bar in 2.0 (as discussed
in the UI thread) so in that case that code will not be necessary
anymore.  On the other hand, ETable/ETree will have to stay for a while,
given that GtkTreeView still is not as feature complete and has
performance issues, and porting to it requires a fair amount of work.

For new widgets, we should put them in the Evolution module and (if they
are of general utility) stick them in libegg, which is the proper thing
to do to eventually have them included into GTK+.

Mike: it would help to have a list of all the GAL widgets and, for each
of them, specify whether they are going to be deprecated and whether
there is an alternative for them in GTK+ or libegg.  We should have some
kind of plan in place to remove the gal dependency in the long term...

Surely there is a lot of cruft there that we should get rid of too.

-- Ettore