Re: About dialog api

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 12:35:27AM +0100, iain wrote:
> 
> I've always seen having one application opening two about dialogs that
> are the same as being sloppy.
> As far as I remember there was an ancient gnome application development
> doc that said it was a bad thing to do.

I don't think anyone is going to notice in practice, or care much if
they do notice. Users may even expect this behavior; it's a bit odd if
choosing About warps an existing dialog across workspaces, or worse,
does nothing at all, instead of opening a dialog as expected.

If you aren't setting transient for on your about dialogs now, I would
argue that's a much more noticeable issue than opening more than one.
It causes multiple UI glitches (you can bury the dialog underneath its
parent, it shows up in task list, etc.)
 
> Why can't gtk_about_new take all the extra options?

The point here is to have a single function call that just takes care
of the about dialog, with no extra code. gtk_about_new() will never be
that, even if it does take more options (you still need to set up its
lifecycle at minimum, unless it takes a bizarre GtkWidget
**static_variable arg).
 
> But seeing as you can't have one window being transient for multiple
> windows, you're never going to get it right if you do it by hand
> either.

You can get it right, gnome-terminal does for example (assuming
multiple terminal windows in the same process). It simply resets
transient for and does another gtk_window_present() every time you
show the about dialog. But this produces the warping effect, and some
window managers probably don't like it much.

Havoc