Re: GnomeMDI - the \"{u}berreply

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Jaka Mocnik <jaka gnu org> writes:

> Hi - nice to see that all of a sudden the MDI is getting all this
> attention ;) I'll try to answer to some of the MDI related questions
> that arose recently:
> 
> 1. I don't really know if GnomeMDI should be moved to libgnome1-compat
> or scrapped completely as I haven't checked yet what remains in compat
> lib: if GnomeApp and UIInfo stuff remain there (AFAIK, they do), there
> is not much work needed to port it to new GTK+ and put it in compat lib,
> if not, I don't think it is worth the effort, as the API really sucks.
> 
> 2. if GnomeMDI is moved to compat lib, then: no, not much work has been
> put in the window-in-window MDI and yes, it should be scrapped (I feel
> like putting a paper bag on my head for ever wasting a moment on it).

Ok, good. I'll copy the GNOME 1.x version so we'll keep source compat.

> 3. as far as the MDI future goes, I wanted to retain only the view
> layout (notebook, toplevel windows, etc. no window-in-window ;) and
> session management code (which I think are not that bad) and make it use
> bonobo stuff for all the UI related work (embeddables and controls) [see
> 3.1].
> 
> 3.1 specifically, I want to create a simple bonobo interface for the
> children, defining the methods that MDI needs for handling children
> (like getName and createView). the programmer would add this interface
> to an existing bonobo object (emebeddable, control or something else).
> the MDI would be a simple bonobo container app which would query an
> object used as child for this interface and use its methods (a natural
> mapping of this child/view concept to bonobo would be the use of an
> embeddable as a child and its views as MDI views). I'm not sure whether
> this should go anywhere in the core libraries (if so, libgnomeui would
> be the most suitable, I suppose) or if there is an interest beyond mine
> for such an interface, but I will be implementing it for the Gnome2
> version of GHex as I will be able to reuse much of the existing MDI code
> (view layout and session management) and leave all the UI merging to the
> now omni-present bonobo.

Well, I like the idea, but I think this should be developed outside of
libgnomeui. However, if you want, I think we can put it in bonobo-extra.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)