Re: What should and should not go into gtk...

[Nils Barth <nils_barth post harvard edu>]

Thus spake Joe Kelch:
> When considering what to go into gtk or gnome, keep in mind that some of us
> are doing cross platform development using gtk+.  It works just fine with Win98,
> for instance, and allows me to do one code for both WinXX and Linux.  In fact
> I can develop using MSVC 6, which is still superior to any IDE for Linux that
> I have found.  Gnome has not as yet, as far as I can tell, been ported to Windows
> (if so, please let me know where I can get it!), so we need pretty high functionality
> from gtk+.

Er, I don't know if this is right perspective; instead, you need
pretty high Cross-Platform functionality.

That doesn't mean that everything should go into GTK, just to be
cross-platform. Instead, if you need some functionality that in a
GNOME library, say, then it seems it would be a better use of
resources to port that library (not all of GNOME!), rather than trying
to integrate it into GTK/bloat GTK.

So I think the suggestion: "if something is useful on WinXX, put it
into GTK" is a red herring.
Things that are appropriate for GTK (portability layers, utility
functions, widgets, etc.) should go into GTK, and things that are
appropriate to GNOME (Bonobo components, etc.) should go into GNOME;

Of course if something can easily be done so it only depends on
glib/gtk and not GNOME (e.g., pango), then it should be done at this
level, perhaps separate from GTK; but don't bloat GTK.

-- 
  -nils
Public key: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~nbarth/pub-key.txt

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