Re: libglade frustration

[Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 15:12 -0500, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> Somehow I think that downloading the actual tarball from wherever the
> website of a said software said to go download it from is much more
> obvious a place then in a "-devel" package, that may or may not be
> available for whatever your distribution flavor of the month happens
> to be.

You're right.  FC6 decided to package gtk-demo with the main gtk2 rpm.
If there was a similar program to gtk-demo for libglade I'm sure they'd
put it in libglade2 also.  In any event, if a user wants to develop with
libglade, he'd need to install the rpms or debs or whatever.  Most users
aren't going to be using the raw tarballs.

The problem with the raw tarballs is that they cause would-be users a
lot of grief.  I and many others on the list no longer recommend that
new developers compile and install the various parts of gtk from
tarballs.  Without the proper understanding of the prefix, the
pkg_config environment variable, and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, users end up
with completely broken systems.

> I dont know, I'm trying to think constructively and its not working
> very well, lets say ideally the test-libglade.c program should be
> included in the api docs either as a reference or even inline.

Agreed.  I did a search of google when I needed to see example code.  I
used "libglade example" as the search terms.  Among the results, I see
this link prominently:  

http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/html/apc.html

Maybe the official test-libglade.c file should be linked into the docs
in such a way as to show up right away.  I dunno.  In any event, if
someone really can't find lots of compile-able, simple, understandable
libglade examples using google, I would be surprised.  But when this
question pops up on google, we should be able to just point them at the
example c file which ought to be prominently linked to from the api
docs.

> Feel free to write a patch to libglade and poke James to apply it...

I may do that if I can figure out a good way to write such a demo.

> OTOH it does seem like an excersize in futility to work on the
> improvement of an api documentation of an api that has only like
> 3 function calls to document.

Agreed.  Perhaps when GTK includes the libglade stuff in the version 3.x
releases, gtk-demo can be partially rewritten to be use some glade files
and thus have a ready example of using the gladexml calls.

Michael


> Cheers,
>                    -Tristan