Top down layout

["Matthew Allen" <list sydneyband com au>]

I'm trying to port an application to GTK that uses top down layout... i.e. given a window of size 1000x700 it 
knows how to fill that space with widgets. However GTK seems adamant to do layout in a bottom up fashion... 
i.e. given buttons and lists and splitters it'll work out how big the window needs to be to show those items.

These 2 ideologies seem to be incompatible. So what I want to ask is there some way I can make this work? 
Clearly I could rewrite the application to use GTK layout, but I think that would take a long time and it's 
not really what I want anyway. I would like some way of using maybe a custom GTK widget that sits in the 
GtkWindow and does it's own internal layout (top down) of it's children but appears to GTK to be a normal 
widget. The problem I have is in getting that root widget to fill the GtkWindow without forcing it's size to 
be anything in particular. I still want the window to be resizable, so if I set the requested size to the 
current client area of the GtkWindow than sure enough the root widget fills the window initially, but I can't 
resize the window to smaller than that original size, and neither does the root widget increase to follow the 
GtkWindow as it gets larger.

This sort of behaviour might not be possible with GTK. But at least I thought I'd ask.
--
Matthew Allen