Re: gtkhtml2 vs. gtkhtml1

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

tis 2002-09-17 klockan 17.51 skrev Ali Akcaagac:

> developer A starts programming an application where he uses gtkhtml2
> because he assumes it's part of gnome 2.x. he starts developing the
> app for well. half a year. then one day the evolution developers
> decide to port it's code to gnome 2.x. the discussion of which html
> library to use comes up again. agreement will be made using gtkhtml1 now
> what do you think how the person (that investigated months into his
> project) will do ?

This is not a problem. Currently neither of GtkHTML1 or GtkHTML2 is in
the core platform. It is a third-party library used by Yelp (as there
are lots of other libraries used by Evolution or other apps). 

Evolution is not part of the core either and it uses many libraries not
part of the core. If it (which it most likely will) use a port of
GtkHTML1 it will also be considered a third-party library.

If Yelp switches to use something other than GtkHTML2 the only thing
that happens is that you can't count on as many users having GtkHTML2 as
you can now. The only drawback is that your application will now depend
on a library that most people won't have installed by default. This is
not a big problem.

The only big problem that you might face is if someone starts doing
heavy development on GtkHTML2 and breaks the API which makes you have to
update your code to work with the new API. But this has nothing to do
with GtkHTML1 vs. GtkHTML2.

Since we still haven't chosen to include either of the two into the core
platform the GNOME project doesn't promise any API/ABI stability. And
since GtkHTML2 currently doesn't get hacked on (except for various
patches that finally go through me since I have to maintain it since I
use it in Yelp) it won't break until someone actually starts doing so.

And when Evolution gets ported I think the big issue is that we might
want to rename one of the libraries so that it doesn't sound like
GtkHTML2 replaces GtkHTML1. I think that at the time GtkHTML2 was
started it was meant to replace GtkHTML1 but editing wasn't included in
GtkHTML1 at that point (correct me if I'm wrong).

So, until we have a maintainer willing of hacking on GtkHTML2, I don't
think this discussion will lead anywhere.

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

-- 
Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
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