Re: [Gal-hackers] Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: What about gal && eel into GNOME 2.0?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com> writes:
> > I'm probably being a party-pooper (and repetitive to boot), but I
> > still don't think libgnomeui should contain "random general purpose
> > widgets that happen to be ready after the GTK freeze and before the
> > libgnomeui freeze."
> 
>   This makes sense.  But on the other hand, I also wish the GTK
> maintainers were more open to contributed widgets.
> 

It upsets me that people feel this way, but at the same time I don't
understand why they do feel this way.

I think there's a difference between wanting the widget to be a
certain way before it goes in, and not wanting the widget at all.
Also there's some difference between thinking a widget is
inappropriate for GTK and thinking all widgets are inappropriate for
GTK.

Every mail to gtk-devel-list I've seen gets answered fairly carefully,
and every bugzilla bug with a proposed patch has been carefully
evaluated, commented on, placed on a milestone, etc. Some things were
punted to 2.2, but rationale was given and some puntage is inevitable.

Re: these widgets in question, they haven't been proposed for GTK at
all as far as I know. The only gal widget really proposed was the
combo widget, and it was extensively discussed and punted to 2.2 for I
think good reasons. But it will go in for 2.2, it's a high priority in
fact.

I'm not saying I think e.g. a splashscreen or shortcut bar widget
necessarily _do_ belong in GTK. But if they don't, I don't see why
they belong in libgnomeui either - perhaps they make sense in some
sort of "office applications library" or "library for apps large
enough to have splashscreens and lots of modes to shortcut between" or
something like that. 

But in any case, they haven't ever been proposed for GTK to my
knowledge.

Anyhow, I would genuinely like to make GTK more open to contributed
widgets. What do you think of the idea of doing 2.2 as a
"libgtk-prototypes" library that would have less strict review
requirements before putting things in, and that people could start
using with GTK 2.0? Would that help with this problem?

Havoc