[glade--]Re: Gnomemm-2 support in glade--

[Christof Petig <christof petig-baender de>]

Peter Wainwright wrote:
> Hi, Christof
>
> I'm posting my latest patches to try to get gnomemm2 support.

Well done. Actually you understood a lot of glademm's internals. Wow.

I only disagree in two points:
- I do not like the environment variable. I'd propose to default to 
gnome1 on glade-1 files and gnome2 on glade-2 files. But since I do not 
have a better solution, I took yours.

- You unconditionally overwrite configure.in, Makefile.am, autogen.sh 
and the like (patch to Cxx.cc). That's not how it's supposed to be. I'd 
like the user to delete the files to get them recreated. This way user 
changes to these files are preserved. Perhaps I should spend another 
option to overwrite these files.

> I have set myself the task of getting a Gnome App widget working.
> It's a challenge...

It had been a challenge when gnome 1.0 was there, too. If you have any 
questions, please ask.

> A number of issues occur to me.
> First and foremost, how to support different Gnome versions?
>
> In Gnome 2, the "gnomemm" libraries have been split considerably.
> There is libgnomemm, libgnomeuimm, libbonobomm, libbonobouimm,
> libgnomecanvasmm, gconfmm - at least; as well as gtkmm itself.
>
> This makes sense from the developer's perspective. However, if
> glade-- is to automatically determine its target, we have to
> cope with the situation when the user has inconsistent versions
> of the libraries installed. It comes back to the question often
> asked "how do i find out what version of GNOME I have installed"...
> There is no simple answer when each library has its own versioning
> scheme.

Hmm. I'd say: If gnomemm2 is detected, stay with it. If gnomemm2 is 
missing, we have a glade-1 file and we still detect gnomemm1, stay with it.

> I see that the first routine called in glade-- is "call_gtkmm_config".
> I split this into two parts, one which uses "pkg-config" style checks
> as in Gnome 2; the other using "gtk-config" and "gnome-config" checks
> as in Gnome 1. At present an environment variable GLADEMM_GNOME_VERSION
> is used to select which of these sections is executed. If you set
> GLADEMM_GNOME_VERSION to 0 both sections are executed, and the latest
> version of each package is detected. This may leave you with
> inconsistent versions - however at this stage we don't know if this
> is a problem. For example, the user may be building a GTK-only
> application, and then it doesn't matter if he has GTK 2 with Gnome 1.
>
> The Gnome 2 detection however will become increasingly messy if we
> add checks for all the new component libraries... Maybe we need to
> simplify with a simple Gnome2/Gnome1 option - I'd really appreciate your
> thoughts on the way you want to go with this.

Did I make my thoughts clear enough? (Please erase any sharp undertone 
propably found here) If not please ask.

It's not uncommon to have gtkmm2 and gnome-1 installed (I still do not 
have/need gnomemm). I'd vote for using gnome-2 even if it is missing if 
gtkmm2 is selected (not the default even if detected if passed a glade-1 
file, see glade--.cc). The user should be able to figure out the missing 
packages to build his new app once configure complains.

> BTW, there's also a patch in here I called "glademm.utsname.patch".
> This is a configure problem I had with the code which tries to
> get utsname by #defining _GNU_SOURCE or __USE_GNU.
> (I'm using Red Hat 7.2 with updates).

already applied. But shouldn't we add -D_GNU_SOURCE to cflags to really 
support it?

> Sometimes autoconf drives me mad...

I learned to need it. And it does it's job well ... unless you try to do 
things in unforeseen ways (which is easily done).

Thank you very much for your patch
   Christof