Re: Theory of good signal/event API design?

[Sander Marechal <s marechal jejik com>]

Chris Vine wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 09:07 +0200, Sander Marechal wrote:
> > Andy Wingo wrote:
> > > Consider writing to gstreamer-devel.
> >
> > I wrote there too, but got no comments. The reason I posted to the GTK
> > lists as well is because GTK is also event/signal driven. I'm not
> > looking for anything GStreamer (or other technology) specific, but for
> > general information about event driven programming.
>
> Well, it's event driven, but its all done in the main event loop.  It's
> not really like a message bus system of the kind that I think you are
> interested in.

Actually, I am not interested in the underlying technology at all. What
I am interested in is: When you write a signal/event driven program or a
widget or whatever, how do you figure out what signals to send out, so
other people can actually do something useful with it?

It's a purely theoretical software engineering question. So far I have
been adding events to my application whenever I needed them myself, but
I would like to have a nice, complete set of events so other people can
do useful things with them too.

I had hoped that the GTK community, having built so many widget and
event driven applications, would have some kind of guidelines, theory,
policy or just general good advice on that.

-- 
Sander Marechal