Re: [gnome-love] Re: Revitalising gnome-love

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 04:04, news optimistic co uk wrote:
> I like the look of all this - a few quick questions here, since I'm thinking of getting involved:
>
> How acceptable is it to use pygtk for a program which you might like to be promoted by GNOME or even 
> included in GNOME? How many bits of GNOME use it? Is it acceptable to combine it with libglade? My Python 
> skills are fairly good, and I like the API.

PyGtk is very acceptable, although currently no applications in the
desktop release use it and we don't ship it as part of the desktop
release. There is a chicken-and-egg thing with language bindings like
PyGTK and gtkmm -- until something comes along that seems worth shipping
in the desktop, the language bindings won't be shipped. Finally, it is
not just acceptable but strongly encouraged to use libglade. User
interfaces based on libglade are much more maintainable than those
constructed purely with code and will be more familiar to other people.

I would like to point out, though, that the building of new applications
is a bit off-topic for this list. The gnome-love charter is "giving love
to *existing* GNOME applications". So if we are going to have activity
on this list like in the old days, we are going to have to keep ontopic.
Of course, there is room to wiggle a bit here, since sometimes a new
application is what is required to fix something. But that is more the
exception that the rule.

Don't take that the wrong way, though -- I can see from the rest of your
mail that you are just scoping out the territory. :-)

> Ditto for gtkmm, although it would mean I'd have to learn C++.
> What are the Java bindings like? Do enough people's machines _have_ Java support to make it practical? I 
> don't even know how fast Java tends to run on non M$/Apple systems.

For gtkmm, the answer is the same as for PyGtk. They are well-maintained
and well-respected bindings. There are good applications written using
both bindings and already available. We are waiting for something to
happen to give one or both bindings enough "critical mass" before
putting them into the main release. (That being said, I have a bias -- I
think the main GNOME release is already too big, so you won't see me
agitating for shipping more stuff, even though PyGtk is obviously the
language binding of the Gods. :-) And now Murray's going to flame me.)

As far as Java goes, it is highly unlikely that GNOME will ever ship
something that requires Java, simply because of licensing reasons (Java
is not open source and even with Sun's recent changes to the
distribution license for the Java runtime there are problems). However,
applications exist that use Java: for example, there the
java-access-bridge provides a link between Java applications and the
GNOME accessibility infrastructure. The currently best freely available
speech synthesiser for using with GNOME requires Java.

> I tried gtk+ and C with code generated by glade, and that started getting a bit long in the code for short 
> in the program, if you see what I mean. I might consider doing some stuff with C and libglade, if I don't 
> find it too tough going, since the amount of time I have to spare is pretty unpredictable (I'm a 
> student...).

Don't do that! Having glade generate C code was a mistake and using it
is now frowned upon and will not get you invited to high society
dinners.

Instead, the highly recommended method is to generate your UI using
glade and then use libglade to load the description at runtime and hook
up callbacks, etc. The code generated by glade itself is far from ideal
in a number of respects and is not maintained.

> The really irritating problem is that I have little or no CVS access, since I am behind a school firewall 
> (AARRGGHH!!!). I might remedy this sooner or later, but for now I can't get access to CVS.

For developing applications that use the GNOME platform, that is not
really a terrible thing. Developing against the released versions is a
safer bet in any case, since we provide a certain level of compatibility
between versions (we could do better, but as a general rule your code
will continue to work if developed for GNOME 2.x and then run on 2.y
where y > x).

> Despite this, I'd love to find somewhere to contribute. Any suggestions?

We are working on it. Please hold the line. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm