Re: Language bindings on developer.gnome.org

[Murray Cumming <murrayc usa net>]

On Tue, 2003-07-22 at 01:51, Curtis C. Hovey wrote:
[snip]
> Complete binding don't exist anymore (well may never had). 
> Here's the rub.  Gnome claims to be language agnostic--it's one of the
> selling points when compared to KDE--but it doesn't really live up to
> that.  The developers who have worked very hard on gtkmm, Python-gnome,
> Ruby-GNOME2, Inti C++, and GTK2-Perl are to be commended.  With GNOME
> doing 6 month releases, they can barely keep up.

gtkmm and pygtk are doing well. With such a large number of bindings, a
variation in quality and activity is to be expected. As I'm sure you
understand, GNOME can not demand anything from bindings developers.

[snip]
> But we need to communicate that just because a developer
> can make an app using a GTK2 binding doesn't mean they are making a
> GNOME2 app.

As far as I can tell, GTK+ will soon be almost all they need, because
APIs are being moved down into it. GConf and libglade will also be quite
essential, but libgnomeui and bonobo will mostly fade away unless you
are doing component stuff. Therefore it will be much easier to provide
complete bindings. At the moment we can not even describe what people
should use in C.

>   I would like a small table that indicates what libs are
> crucial for integrating with the desktop, and what language provide
> that, but I may be asking for too much. The issue of what really
> constitutes a GNOME2 app is a desktop-devel discussion.

Sure, that could be useful, but IMHO it's a question that will not have
an answer until GTK+ 2.4 and maybe GNOME 2.6. The C API is confused, but
it's settling down.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murray usa net
www.murrayc.com