Re: [gedit-list] Bonobo usage in Gedit

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Ryan McDougall wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I hope this is the correct place to talk about developing gedit, if not
> please let me know.
>
>  
Sure!

If you want you may also drop by in #gedit on irc and take a look at 
live.gnome.org/Gedit

> I decided to look around gedit, and maybe start hacking it, and I
> noticed that it uses Bonobo. Bonobo is still a bit of black magic to me,
> so I was wondering what it is used for in gedit? Would d-bus be suitable
> given the trend of removing Bonobo from components due to its
> complexity?
>  
Yes, bonobo is still used in gedit, but getting rid of it is definately 
on the plan!

It is used for two things:

1 - libbonoboui is used for menus and toolbars: this is due to the fact 
that when a plugin system was added to gedit we needed a way to 
merge/unmerge menu items dinamically and libbonoboui was the only viable 
solution. As of gtk 2.4, GtkUIManager has been integrated in gtk and we 
should migrate our menus to use it.
However this is a *big* task, it requires redesigning how the gedit MDI 
works and to modify all the plugins: the wiki page has some more details 
about this.

2 - bonobo-activation-server is used to ensure that only one instance of 
gedit is running. The basic idea is this: the first time gedit is run, 
it starts a sessionwide server, if another instance of gedit is launched 
before the first one is closed it connects to the server and requests it 
to open a new window or tab and then it exits. This design allows to not 
duplicate memory usage for all the instances running and also allows 
interactions between a window an another (like dragging a tab from a 
window to another) without out of process communication.
D-BUS is definately one of the candidates to replace bonobo in (2), but 
we haven't yet investigated the details (Note that properly implementing 
this solution is not specific to gedit, enforcing a unique instance with 
bonobo-activation-server is quite common in gnome applications)


That said, note that gedit doesn't use the real bonobo black magic 
(bonobo components, property bags, monickers and all that stuff) and 
more than possible hack on gedit ignoring how bonobo works.


Hope that helps, if you have more questions just ask.


Ciao,
   Paolo