[Glade-devel] Auto update for the preview feature

[marcodiegomesquita at gmail.com (Marco Diego Aurélio Mesquita)]

Hi Devs!

Auto-updating previews seems a good feature to have and I'm interested
in implementing it. Currently, to update a preview, the whole
interface is sent from glade to glade-previewer. Tristan told me that
if glade is going to have auto updating previews, it must be done with
finer granularity, i.e: sending only the toplevel of the preview that
will be updated.

I decided to take a look on how to do it. It seems that the easiest
way to do it is creating a new function just like glade_project_write
that would take a new argument: the toplevel widget of the preview.
This new function would then generate an xml definition for all non
widget objects plus the widget that is going to be previewed. The
reason why all non widget objects will be on the xml definition is
because it is complicated to determine which one are needed or not for
the toplevel widget to be displayed properly. Is this idea acceptable?

Also, UI-wise, how should the user tell glade that a preview should be
auto update-able?

I think that's all. It doesn't seem too complicated to implement. Any
objection? Thought? Comment?