Re: Plans for 1.3/1.4

[Havoc Pennington <hp Mcs Net>]

On Mon, 1 Mar 1999, Ian Main wrote:
> 
> Hmm.. it's unfortunate that it is this way.  The problem being that then
> gnome gets automagic bookmarks etc, while people using only gtk have to
> implement it on a per application basis.
> 
> This creates the possibility of having bookmarks (as an example) implemented
> in different ways in different applications, and in an inconsistent way (for
> the user).
>

This is true of everything right now though - if you don't use Gnome, all
the dialogs look different because each app does it their own way. If you
don't use Gnome the stock pixmaps are different or nonexistent. If you
don't use Gnome there's no gnome-config library so every app saves config
files in a different place in a different format. If you don't use Gnome
you have to create your own GnomeApp-type thing which won't behave like
the Gnome one or save toolbar positions in the same way.

Gtk also has built-in "please make an inconsistent UI" features, like 
gtk_ctree_set_expander_style().

It is my impression that this is a Gtk design decision, that it is
following the X "don't impose policy" route. So from that point of view if
you want a consistent UI you should be using Gnome. Gtk is a lower-level
library which maintains more flexibility, lighter weight, and perhaps
window-system independence. (And it is also a good bit more mature,
cleaner, and less "hacky" than gnome-libs, though that is probably
an unrelated issue.) 
 
But this is only my impression, I'm sure Owen and Tim can say something
more enlightening.

To get back to the point, shouldn't each application have different
bookmarks anyway? (i.e. apps should "remember" files that can be loaded
into that app.) And for Gnome it would be inconsistent if the bookmark
list wasn't saved in .gnome, and it would be somewhat unfortunate to
duplicate gnome-config sort of code in Gtk, especially if gnome-config
gets extended to optionally use LDAP blah blah and Gtk does not.

In practical terms you could just avoid the whole issue for now and 
have load/save history signals with some reasonable default, then 
Gnome or whatever could override them.

(OK, sorry it took me so much text to reach that conclusion. :-)

> I personally think gnome should be using gmc for the file selection (via
> CORBA) but that's another thing all together ;-)
> 

The problem with that is that right now gnome-libs doesn't require you to
run the desktop environment, so if that is implemented IMO it should be
behind some sort of GnomeFileSelection abstraction which falls back to 
the GtkFileSelection. It would be quite neat though.

Havoc