Re: Porting to GTK+ 3

[Brandon Lewis <brandon collabora co uk>]

On Sun, 2010-06-13 at 15:26 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-06-11 at 09:19 +0100, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> > > As we are forced to do an ABI break, we could also take this
> > opportunity
> > > to make other changes that you didn't want to make yet because of
> > ABI
> > > stability.
> > 
> > I wouldn't want to do any large API changes (if we were going to do
> > that, I'd rather do a big rethink of the whole API, possibly getting
> > rid
> > of some things like the model/view split, cascading style properties,
> > the use of interfaces, letting all items have children etc. But that's
> > a
> > lot of work).
> 
> Shall we start a branch for this?
> 
> Openismus has some trainees who could do simple stuff like removing the
> model/view split and maybe some other things, if you can describe them.
> 
> > The only small API change request is the get_bounds() function
> > signature. And I still don't really think that is worth doing.
> 
> This seems fairly harmless. May I apply it?
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=556145
> "Move child API into GooCanvasContainer"
> 
> And I still believe that this is the right thing to do (The goocanvasmm
> API already does this):
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555097#c33
> "Common interface to position and resize items"

As a contributor to a project that depends on goocanas, I want to
encourage you to implement these changes. I would happily re-write my
code for the increased flexibility they would provide.

It may not be as ambitious as what Damon is hoping for, but ambitious
plans have a way of never coming to pass, while these relatively small
changes would make the library much more enjoyable to use.

We can save ambitious plans for an experimental branch or another
library altogether. I have some ideas on this subject, but I'll save
them for another time.

--Brandon