Re: [gnome-db] proposing libgda/libgnomedb as part of the GNOME platform

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 13:28 +0200, Vivien wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I have been thinking for a long time about maybe proposing libgda and
> > libgnomedb as part of the GNOME developer platform.
> >
> > This will involve us following GNOME release schedules (1 every 6
> > months) and commit to the UI, string and code freezes at the same time
> > than the rest of GNOME modules. This will put on us a bit more pressure,
> > since we'll have to be a bit more strict on how and when we do the
> > releases, and when we add new features, etc.
> >
> > On the other side, it will give us much more visibility, and will allow
> > many of the GNOME apps that use those libraries to have that support
> > compiled in always in a default GNOME setup. It will allow also to
> > propose at a later time applications like Mergeant, Glom, etc
> >
> > So, what do people think? Should we go ahead and propose it for
> > inclusion, or just continue to be a part of GNOME Office and ship only
> > with that?
> 
> I'd vote for that proposal for the reasons you mentionned, but first I'd
> like to go over all the library calls and remove the ones which are seldom
> (or never) used, or which seem innapropriate (clean up the code).
> 
yes, as I said in a previous mail, we will need a good API review.

> This code cleanup is necessary because I believe being in the GNOME dev.
> platform means we won't be able to change the API quickly (we'll have to
> mark some as deprecated first, etc).
> 
yes, it means that indeed.

> I was thinking mainly about the XML queries (which are not yet useable,
> and putting somme efforts into them would be nice), and also with the
> get_schema stuff (make sure all the get_schema implementations return the
> same things),
>
yes, could you please add individual bugs in bugzilla for each provider
not working? Thus, I'll create a milestone ("api-review" and set all
bugs related to the api cleanup to that milestone.

About the XML queries, we really need to put that to work, or disable
it. AFAIR, it should pretty much work, so maybe we could put a bit of
effort on it.

>  the GnomeDbBrowser, GnomeDbIconList, GnomeDbQueryBuilder,
> etc.
> 
I am thinking libgnomedb might need much more work than libgda for its
inclusion. As you say, we have a few widgets which are not finished,
buggy, or both, and others might need a lot of work to be API-clean-and-
ready. So maybe it'd be better to propose first libgda and then
libgnomedb.

Anyway, I think we should take the GNOME 2.8 timeframe (ending in
september) for the API review and cleanup and then, if we all agree, try
to propose it (libgda only, unless we also clean up libgnomedb) for
inclusion in GNOME 2.10.

> Also the documentation needs some work (for libsql for example) and it
> needs to be able to display into devhelp.
> 
there's a guy from the Spanish GNOME group who created the devhelp file
for libgda. I asked him to send a patch for inclusion in CVS, so waiting
for that.

About API documentation, yes we need much better one.

cheers