Re: module viewer

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Wed, Oct 27, 1999 at 10:16:55AM +0300, Ali Abdin wrote:
> I'm curious, if it works in GTK, why would you want to port it to GNOME?
> 
> Not every app is a candidate for GNOME (it'd mean a lot of unnecessary 
> bloat by linking to libgnomeui and libgnome and stuff).

Just the opposite, you will be using more features from the library rather
then hand coding them, they will be therefore shared among apps and you will
actually have better memory usage.

Another thing you gain by using GNOME is a lot of consistency, translated
standard menus, buttons and messages, session managment support, framework
for application windows, easy and consistent MDI, simple sound, consistent
configuration, standard dialogs (which also makes apps use less code and
easier to write), much easier graphics engine (the canvas), and a whole bunch
of other stuff.  As far as I can see you have almost nothing to loose and
everything to gain by using GNOME over just GTK.  And this list will get much
larger with GNOME 2.0.

I think the single biggest gain of using gnome is reducing the amount of GUI
code in your app, and making your app consistent with other apps in
behaviour.  Imagine if everyone implemented everything from scratch, such as
property dialogs or MDI's.  Every MDI would work a bit different, and it
would get annoying.  I for example like all my mdi apps to work with the
tabbed MDI model, if everyone implemented their own MDI, some would support
it but I'd have to set it in each app, and some would not support it and
support some other form.   It's a hassle for the user.

> The advantage of coding in GTK means more users can use it and it will 
> generally be faster.

Just about every place that has GTK has GNOME, unless you're talking about a
really exotic port such as windows.

> These are some of the reason why you would want to port a Gtk+ app to 
> GNOME. Generally though this may alienate some people (KDE?) who install 
> Gtk+ and KDE but no GNOME. (For exmaple, i'm sure there are many GNOME 
> people who have installed Qt and not KDE - that way you can have the 
> necessary apps of both sides without the other 'environments'). You have 
> to evaluate it yourself and decide which you want

You don't need to run the 'enviroment' to run an app that uses the GNOME
libs, just as much as you don't need the 'enviroment' to run an app that uses
KDE libs.  All people have to install is GNOME libs, and I'd say most systems
that come with GTK+ already come with GNOME libs, and most systems that come
with Qt, come with KDE.  I don't see any advantage to not having gnome or kde
libs installed.

So I think not porting to GNOME, unless there is a pressing reason not to do
so, is a dumb idea.  I think it's better to write it from scratch as a GNOME
app in fact.

George

-- 
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George Lebl <jirka@5z.com> http://www.5z.com/jirka/
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