Re: [gnome-love] At last.................... I made it.......

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

(Sorry for the duplicate, I forgot to cc the list)


On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 14:31 +0700, Melinda wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > (I haven't tried the program yet, may you provide some screenshots?)
> I have uploaded screenshot. Please take a look.

cool, more comments on the UI below.

> > It would be even nicer if maybe you could try to get it integrated
with
> > the core gnome components, in other words integrate it with the
> > wallpaper selector that it is included in gnome-control-center. 
> I would love to but......
>
> > That
> > would probably mean use plain gtk instead of gtkmm 
> This is the problem. I hate coding in C. I just wonder the reason you
> said this is Gnome desktop is developed in C and is stupid to rewrite
(
> although just one component like gnome control center ) in another
> language ( although C++ is brother from C ) or it is impossible for
non
> C programmer to join Gnome desktop development team ( to contribute ).
I
> thought the reason people to make GTK+ binding is to make non C
> programmer to contribute easily to Gnome project. Please correct me if
I
> am wrong. Is it still possible for non C programmer like me ( I love
C++
> ) to contribute to Gnome desktop project? It is stupid if I have to
move
> from C++ to C just because I want to do this. 

Well, I'll not get into a flamewar regarding c vs c++ vs python vs mono
vs java etc. (even if I have my opinions, poke me on irc if you want to
hear them). Let's stick to the facts: the core gnome desktop is written
in c (with glib/gobject, which makes it _way_ nicer than plain c) and as
of today no other languages will be included in the *core* desktop
release. I'll not dig into the reasons why originally c was chosen (they
are known and they easily are inflammatory material), but the reason why
only one language (in this case c) is allowed in the core desktop are
simple: consistency and maintainability.
In particular in this case, we are talking about an *already written*
part of the desktop (control-center) and there is no way that it will be
rewritten from scratch just to switch language.
Gnome bindings are great and external apps and ISV (Independent Software
Vendors) are encouraged to use them, if they want to, but if you want to
work to fiddle with gnome internals you have to use c.


> > and it would not be
> > "your" program anymore, 
> doesn't matter to me. But you know, assume I write this program in C
and
> pure GTK+ so the language is not issue anymore. Assume my program is
> stable enough to merge in Gnome.

Note: I didn't say to *rewrite* your program in c and to try to get such
a program included. What I said is to investigate if it possible to make
a *patch* to the background applet in gnome-control-center that provides
the same feature.

>  I doubt they ( Gnome developers ) would
> like this feature included in Gnome control centre because they would
> like to keep Gnome as simple as possible. Their motto is KISS ( Keep
It
> Simple Stupid ). Yeah, I disagree with them because M$ will put this
> feature into Longhorn so each virtual desktop will have each
wallpaper.
> KDE already have it. So why not Gnome?

Actually I'm pretty confident that such a feature has a good chance to
go in since, as I already said, it is really useful and IMHO having
different wallpapers for each workspace would make them more easily
recognizable and thus more usable.

On the other hand be included the UI should be ore carefully considered
to be as simple and intuitive as possible.
My personal preference on this would be to just have a check button at
the bottom the current wallpaper selector which says something like "Use
the same background image for all workspaces": if it is checked the
image the user select is used for each workspace, if it is not checked
the image is used only for the current workspace.


ciao
        paolo