Re: GNOME::Selector

[Dietmar Maurer <dietmar ximian com>]

Martin Baulig wrote:

> 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.

Sure.

> 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 .... ?

Your approach sounds reasonable, but I don't think we should put that code into
the base libraries (libgnome, libgnomeui), simply because it is not finished. Cant
we keep the old versions until we have something better. Jacob is working on a
file selector, so we will have at least a nice file selector soon. We can also
include your generic selector code when it is finished and we see that it is
better ;-)

- Dietmar