Re: Review of libgnomeui's construct-time properties

[murrayc t-online de (Murray Cumming)]

On Mon, 2001-11-12 at 22:00, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Mon, 2001-11-12 at 00:27, Michael Meeks wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Murray,
> > 
> > On 10 Nov 2001, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > I have just reviewed all the *_new functions in libgnomeui to check 
> > > that all the widgets use construct-time properties instead of doing     
> > > custom stuff in *_new. I have ignored deprecated widgets.
> >   
> >         Wow - that's great work :-)
> > 
> > > I'll start making a patch for this if the maintainer agrees.
> >   
> >         This is really good news; please do !
> 
> I'm having real problems with this.
> 
> 1.
> The construct-time properties for some widgets such as GnomeAppBar and
> GnomeDruidPageEdge would have to be set in exactly the correct order.
> Even if this was acceptable, I'd have to change the order of the
> parameters to some _new() functions to show this.

I discussed this with Tim Janik on gtk-devel-list
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2001-November/msg00351.html

and discovered that this cannot be fixed without either

a) Adding new object struct fields whose values are only used during the
instantiation process. For instance, this would add 6 otherwise useless
temp_* fields to GnomeDruidPageEdge.

or

b) Adding a great deal of code that would allow the parameters to be
specified in any order, even though they are only actually used in the
order of the parameters to the _new() function.

So, I can't fix it, and the existing _constuct() methods are enough for
gtkmm. But this should still be considered a bug that others, such as
the GLADE developers, might care about.

> 
> 2.
> Some widgets, such as GnomeFileEntry, and GnomeIconEntry already use the
> deprecated gtk args system for similar stuff. Maybe I should convert
> these to use the properties system instead. But I'm worried that I won't
> know about other code that uses the old args system until we get runtime
> bug reports later.

I am still waiting for a response about these deprecated args.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com