Re: soc idea: gconf-gtk tools

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam list googlemail com>]

Hi Vincent

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> It seems like you want to define the dialog in an abstract way. I would
> think that in many many cases, this won't work because an app always
> need a specific thing that you will have a hard time defining in this
> abstract way.
>
> It'd probably better to integrate this part of your proposal in glade
> itself.

You make an excellent point. I already ran into this problem in my
'prototype' version, and the (incomplete) solution was to allow
arbitrary widgets in the dialog definition with code to bridge them to
gconf manually. It's pretty ugly. The prototype generates C code, but
ideally my SOC version would just make a .ui file - but that throws
the idea of allowing user code in the definition out of the window.
And now I think of it, it's probably a more common scenario that I'd
imagined.

The whole idea of dialog generation is to make it easy to make them
nicely formatted, which seems to involve the same pattern of hboxos
and vboxes and padding. Check out a random capplet and see how it's
formatted - that's quite hard to achieve in GLADE, which is why I
wanted them to be generated. However, perhaps that solution is
overkill anyway. There could be:
* a GLADE template or plugin of some sort which could generate the dialogs
* a GtkSettingsDialog that would handle the formatting itself somehow
* better yet, some sort of GtkHeaderHBox (in fact, perhaps it could be
achieved with a type of GtkFrame) that would handle the formatting
within that sort of dialog easily.

This is the first time these ideas have occured so I'll have to have a
think about them. I did always have a nagging doubt that introducing a
new language and a new tool was the wrong solution.
Sam