Re: GNOME::Selector

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

Joe Shaw <joe ximian com> writes:

> > You guys are all talking about file selectors ...
> 
> This is because I hadn't seen any other examples until this email. The
> point of my last mail was that if we are to have a good, generic interface
> for selectors that multiple selectors need to be implemented
> simultaneously to give it enough testing.
> 
> Aside from that, Jacob and Dietmar more than adequately conveyed my
> feelings as well in their emails. I appreciate the work you are doing on
> this, but I am nervous about putting brand new, experimental and -complex-
> interfaces into gnome-libs when we're so short on time... a sloppy API
> freeze for gnome-libs is in one month.

Well, if we put it somewhere else we need to find a solution for the selector
widgets in libgnomeui.

I really don't want to "fight" this API into gnome-libs shortly before the
freeze if you guys don't like it - but my idea behind GNOME::Selector was to
make the selector widgets in libgnomeui suck a lot less than they did in
GNOME 1.x and to give them a common API.

So here are the possibilities I see:

a) move the Gnome_Selector.idl file from libgnome to libgnomeui, don't
   install it but only use it internally and make gnome-selector-client.[ch]
   the "official" API to access/control the selector widgets.

b) Un-componentize GnomeSelector by merging GnomeSelector and
   GnomeSelectorClient and only use it as a normal C API.

   This'd keep the common API for all the selector widgets in libgnomeui,
   but we'd loose the chance to easily replace the implementation later on.

However, I'm starting to get really annoyed about all this stuff. So at the
moment, I'd appreciate a lot if someone could tell me what to do. And whoever
does this, please _look_ at this stuff before flaming around.

I'm also starting to dislike my own API after following advices from people
to use "standard Bonobo stuff" like PropertyBag's and EventSource's -
originally I had a small and clean C API in mind (GnomeSelectorClient) which
totally hides the fact that these are components.

So, it may make sense to move gnome-selector.[ch] from libgnome to libgnomeui,
merge it with gnome-selector-component.[ch] and make gnome-selector-client.[ch]
a real C API. This way we'd get two interfaces: gnome-selector.[ch] to develop
a selector component (and we can even make this private in libgnomeui) and
gnome-selector-client.[ch] to access the selector widgets in libgnomeui.

Comments, ideas .... ?

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