Re: About dialog API / extensibility

[Matthias Clasen <maclas gmx de>]

On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 18:51, 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.

Extensibility and simplicity are somewhat conflicting goals for a
convenience API like this dialog. My goal when developing whats
currently proposed in #80468 was to make it flexible enough to meet the
needs of most apps while keeping it simple. The proposal is already more
flexible than GnomeAbout (it includes website, license, artists), but
not endlessly extensible. If you need that, you can use GtkDialog
directly - although we could make it a bit easier to create a
GtkAboutDialog lookalike by separating the "link-like button" into a
separate widget (GtkHref...) and replace the auto-linkification for the
text views by a suitable tag. 

Commenting more specifically on your custom-page proposal, I think it is
not really suitable to arbitrary information pages to that notebook. 
The subdialog is called "Credits", not "Credits and other info". Thats
also the reason why I decided to put the license in a separate
subdialog.

>   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!

You have not been ignored. I have commented earlier that I think that
this extensibility idea is not suitable for GtkAboutDialog. Instead I
have incorporated your "Artwork" example into the proposal...


Matthias