Re: gnome desktop integration library

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 14:27 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:

> > I see nothing wrong with a gtk_get_screensaver_is_active() function. 
> > Lots of apps need that, why would gtk be against this?
> >
> because of the D-BUS dependency? It makes sense to have, as you
> mentioned, screensaver stuff in GTK, but the problem is the same as with
> GConf. Until GTK can depend on GConf, gnome-vfs, D-BUS, etc, we'll need
> a place to put all the stuff that depends on that and which is used to
> talk to GNOME desktop components.

I think you and Havoc agree on everything, *except* for "what stuff can
GTK+ depend on?".

We need to pull some stuff under GTK+:  GConf, Gnome-VFS, D-Bus.
Gnome-VFS is by far the messiest and least-well-defined one.  GConf is
semi-messy.  D-Bus is probably okay.

Creating a separate library to GTK+ just because we can't pull in GConf
and Gnome-VFS as they are, is a bad idea.  It is just ignoring the main
problem, which is that those libraries need to be cleaned up (in terms
of API and in terms of scope --- why does Gnome-VFS have MIME handling,
DNS-SD browsing, and volume mounting!?).  

We have spent many years ignoring this problem, and the platform has
been chugging along just fine.  It just has many half-finished parts
flying around.  If want to integrate all that stuff, we'll need to do
cleanup.

So let's do that cleanup so that those libraries (or equivalent
functionality) is good enough to go under GTK+, instead of ignoring the
issue again and creating yet another library.

Remember that once you are done, you'll *have* to make big chunks of the
old GConf and Gnome-VFS use the new stuff internally.  We don't want the
situation where we deprecate something, but don't provide a migration
path for old apps.

  Federico