Re: GTK+-2.x planning

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes: 
>  * What's missing? What do we need to do, that we _can_ do in 
>    2.x that isn't below? Feel free to be blue-sky, but blue
>    sky stuff is at least 2.6, maybe 2.8 :-)
>

One thing I've been meaning to bring up is printing. Right now we
basically have that on the someday-maybe 3.x timescale - which is 2004
or most likely later. I think a stopgap would be valuable if we can
come up with something meaningful, perhaps just a virtual
GdkDrawable. But I don't know what the range of options would really
be, what would be involved, or who we have who could work on it.

Anyhow I think we should consider whether there's a stopgap that can
be done with maybe a month of effort that wouldn't clutter the API too
badly long term.

Or perhaps a below-the-GTK-level solution is more appropriate. I'd
like to see that too.
 
> GTK+-2.2:
> 
> * Multihead support
> * Official Win32 port
> * Fully usable RTL editing  (#73307, #70451, #50770)
> * Xft2 support for Pango
> * OpenType Indic shapers for Pango

One more suggestion here is the "trivial shaper" people can use to
implement terminals, fixed-cell-width text widgets, and cross-platform
wrapper toolkits like SWT/AWT that want to see an X-style font API.

i.e. essentially just "give me a glyph for each character in a string"
- so people using Pango as an X core vs. Xft abstraction more or less.

I'm not sure how complex a solution we need but maybe it can be done
very simply and if so it might be a nice 2.2 candidate. The "use Xlib"
suggestion is working really badly in practice since it means you lose
the Xlib/Xft abstraction, and have to do your own font selector, and
get different fonts in different places.

> GTK+-2.4:
> 
> * File selection widget
> * Replacement combo/option-menu widget
> * Action based menu API
> * New toolbar widget (#70606, #6112, #50367, #55393)

I would suggest doing the dock widget as well, in conjunction with the
toolbar/menu stuff.

> GTK+-2.6:
> 
> * Icon list widget

We may need a simple icon list for the file selector. We would to
implement the usual Windows-like selector. It could be left private in
2.4 of course, if we did something so simple that it was useless
outside of the filesel context.

> * Sheet widget

I consider this one sort of low priority.

> * Reworked tooltips (#50619, #56291, #62174, #65490)

Including more general help support, probably.

> * Autocompletion and history for GtkEntry (#69613)

This one is fairly high priority since it's needed to kill GtkCombo
off.

> * Disclosure triangle widget
> * GnomeColorPicker style color selection button

These two are so trivial they could really go in at any time, I don't
see any value to delaying them past "whenever people put them together"

I would add the font picker button and the file picker entry, in
addition to the color picker.

It looks to me like you sort of have the hard stuff (combo, filesel,
menu API) all on 2.4, and a bunch of trivial stuff on 2.6;
realistically at least one hard thing should probably be on 2.6.

In my head I'd sort of thought about it in reverse, that for 2.4 we
could just fill in a bunch of these little trivialities and then work
on the hard stuff starting now but targeting 2.6. 

No doubt in practice we can just ship 2.4 in fall with whatever's
ready by then, so we'll end up with whatever people decide to work on.

Havoc