Re: Major design flaws in BonoboUI ?

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> writes:

> Hi Maciej,
> 
>         Watch the Meeks get super defensive about his pet code :-)
> 
> On 20 Feb 2001, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com> writes:
> > > On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 04:06:59AM -0800, George wrote:
> > > In an ideal world the bonobo-ui specification and verb/layout
> > > split would be use in gnome-libs.
> >
> > I think the Bonobo system still has major design flaws and many
> > implementation problems. We are still finding serious bugs in it
> 
>         Really !? interesting that you arn't reporting them to me, or
> sending me patches. In the last weeks the only significant fix to the code
> was of a minor feature I added recently to accelerate Nautilus.

I sent a patch for a serious reference counting bug in the merging
code quite recently, for one. I'm not all complaints. :-)

> > and the lack of so much as a DTD for the UI XML format makes it a very
> > error-prone API for developers.
> 
>         If the lack of a DTD really bothers you, then please write one. I
> personaly don't loose sleep about it, the format is documented by Havoc
> and myself in bonobo/doc/ui-xml.txt for developers to use. Furthermore, it
> is anticipated that GUI tools ( glade ? ) will be developed to generate
> and edit the XML. The lack (?) of a DTD for a .glade file doesn't keep me
> awake at night.

There is a DTD for .glade files, in fact. A DTD is useful because then
developers can validate their XML for correctness. Availability of a
tool to programatically generate the XML helps somewhat but does not
eliminate the problem. Using an XML format with no DTD as part of an
API is risky.

I will gladly write a DTD if you'd accept such a patch to the bonobo
documentation. Writing the oaf one took all of two hours of learning
about XML and 15 minutes of writing the thing.

> > I don't expect it to be ready for prime time for GNOME 2 unless some
> > major peer review action of the design and implementation happens.
> 
>         Ok, well I don't understand the substance of your criticism. 

I'm sorry, it was unfair of me to make this strong a statement without
supporting evidence. I therefore withdraw my criticism, since I am not
prepared to defend it, and apologize.

I hope we can finish the task of planning 2.0 at the big picture level
and move on to discussing particular desired features/changes and
table the discussion of menu/toolbar APIs for now.

My apologies,

Maciej