Re: About dialog API / extensibility

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 12:51, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
>   Please, someone take a serious look at
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80468
> 
>   What's the point on making the about dialog take a dozen arguments. 
> Why not make it extensible instead?  Surely you realize how
> fundamentally flawed this hard-coded dialog is.  You cannot guess every
> possible field an application author might want to add in the future,
> and for every new field the library wants to support there will be API
> incompatibility.
> 
>   One way to make it API/ABI compatible with future releases is to use
> properties:
> 	dialog = g_object_new (GTK_TYPE_DIALOG, "authors", authors, "license",
> "GPL ....", NULL);

I don't think you read the thread or the GTK+ bug report. The current
API proposal uses properties.

>   However, I think that's not enough.  We should make it extensible too,
> making it accept user-defined information tabs.
> 
>   I have already mentioned this before, but have been ignored.  At the
> very least, someone tell me I'm wrong, or that I should come up with a
> patch, but say something.  Thanks!

Remember, no matter what we do, the API will always be perfectly
extensible. You will always have gtk_dialog_new(). The about
dialog is just a convenience.

I think it would be a serious mistake to reveal so much about the
way that the convenience about dialog works that we couldn't change 
it later.

As for extra tabs of contributors ... it's been discussed at great
length, but I don't think we've had an API proposal that everybody
was happy with.

My favorite proposal was a "hack" where you could stick titles
into the list of contributors:
 
 *Coders
 Susan Smith
 Tom Taylor
 *Art
 Umberto Updike
 Vanessa Vaughn
 
And then the widget would display it in whatever way it found
appropriate. But Matthias didn't think much of that.
 
Regards,
                                            Owen