Re: GNOME and geometry specifications

[Drazen Kacar <dave srce hr>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Jim Stewart wrote:
> > 
> > is it really a good idea to ignore X resources too, though?  i guess gnome has
> > its own way of doing that as well, but is there any good reason not to build
> > GTK with Xt?
> 
> It is sort of academic at this point, it's too late to move away from
> GtkObject. The decision was probably made by the original Gtk authors back
> in the mists of time.

According to one interview with Matis and Kimball, they did it from the
scratch because they wanted to learn how to do it. I'm not advocating Xt,
but I am advocating X resources (or something similar) and a unified
command line API. Whether it'll be -geometry or --geometry is not
really important.

GTK app can have config file where you can set things one usually sets with
X resources, but there's no way to set it one way for one display and
another way for another kind of display. That's targeted to desktop
systems where you have everything on one computer and no X terminals.
In case you have to configure something to work nicely on grayscale
X terminal and on 8bit Pseudo Color and on 24bit True Color and on small
monitors and on 21" trinitrons and with X11R6 and with X11R5 and so on,
things become nasty if you don't have X resources.

As for special requirements some apps have regarding --geometry; you can
parse command line arguments before you call GTK init functions. So you
can handle your special case of --geometry and remove it from argv[]
before you call any of GTK functions. I think that most apps don't
need special handling for this and it would be really nice if GTK
handled it.

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