Re: About dialog API

[Matthias Clasen <maclas gmx de>]

On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 04:51, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > 
> > Maybe we should add typed arrays, so that we can make it a string array.
> > Isn't there already a bug about adding typed arrays ?
> 
> I'm not that crazy about GTK+ API blocking on GObject additions at
> the moment, I must admit :-)
> 
> I would like to see typed arrays in GObject, but there are various
> implementation details and questions about C marshaling that
> would most likely make it take quite a while to sort out.
> 

Hmm, Owen, it turns out we both know too little about GObject. I looked
closer and while GValueArray is in fact just an untyped array of
GValues, GParamSpecValueArray does offer 

a) typed arrays (by setting element_spec to a ParamSpec describing the
expected type)
b) fixed-length arrays (by setting fixed_n_elements to a nonzero value)

In fact, the code I copied from GnomeAbout already uses a) to inform GUI
builders about the fact that "authors" is a string array:


g_object_class_install_property (
    object_class,
    PROP_AUTHORS,
    g_param_spec_value_array (
        "authors",
        _("Authors"),
        _("List of authors of the programs"),
        g_param_spec_string (
            "author-entry",
            _("Author entry"),
            _("A single author entry"),
            NULL,
            G_PARAM_READWRITE),
        G_PARAM_READWRITE));


The "author-entry" describes the expected type of the array elements.

[...]

> One possibility would be to extend the parsing of the contributers list
> to allow division into sections with section names.
> 
> "* Coders\n"
> "Matthias Clasen\n"
> "* Artwork\n"
> "Garrett Lesage\n"
> 
> Which you could display in various ways, including notebook tabs.
> This type of thing could *clearly* get out of hand, but done
> moderately with caution, I think may be cleaner than extensive
> amounts of API. (Especially if everything is property based)

This seriously goes in the direction of an XML api (which I'm sure
someone is going to propose shortly), and I have to admit that I find
these abominable and wouldn't want to be responsible for introducing
them to GTK...

Regards,

Matthias