Re: Harmony + GNOME (Was: Re: C++)

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, Joel Dillon wrote:
> 
>  Well, at this stage I would just like to know what the view of the Gnome
> people is on non-gtk widget sets and Gnome. So I'd like either for noone
> to raise any objections, or for a few people to object but for someone
> important in Gnome to say that other widget sets than gtk can be used if
> they fit the look and feel guidelines.

I'm not important, but my view would be that non-Gtk is fine if it's
indistinguishable. However, this may not be easy. Just to look like Gnome,
you'll have to use all the Gnome pixmaps in buttons and so on. But to
really work with Gnome, you need to work with session management, help,
etc., not just be cosmetically similar. 

If you think of Gnome like the Windows or MacOS environments, this is the
same situation.  The same thing applies to Gnome that applies there: if
your widget set is sufficiently native-like, you can use it. So basically,
if your cross platform set is ported to Gnome, you can use it with Gnome.
I'm not sure a port to Gtk would be sufficient. "Port" could be in the
"wrapper" or "emulation" sense, of course, depending on the toolkit.

If you aren't thinking cross-platform, just different, I don't know why
you'd want to do that - much pain, little gain. Since your widgets have to
look and act like Gnome/Gtk, all you're getting is a different API. And
your API can't be *that* much better. Though if you want to do this, no
one will stop you. 

Gnome users can always run regular X apps, of course, so you can write
things with Gnome users in mind that are not actually Gnome apps.

Re: the look and feel guidelines, IMO at this time they are not detailed
enough to qualify an app as a Gnome app. Plenty of things are kind of
implicitly determined by gnome-libs, and if you didn't use gnome-libs your
app could meet the guidelines and still be pretty out of place. I think
the guidelines would have to be a lengthy and painfully detailed
specification before meeting the letter of them would be sufficient. 
Defining the specs by an implementation seems simpler to me, though, so
I'm not suggesting that anyone write such a huge document.


Anyway, my .02. Summary: porting a cross platform toolkit to Gnome and
using it sounds great to me; trying to emulate Gnome look and feel with
some random X-only toolkit sounds a little silly, but no one will keep you
from doing it.

Havoc Pennington
http://pobox.com/~hp