Re: About dialog API / extensibility

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

A Qui, 2003-05-08 às 19:27, Owen Taylor escreveu:
> 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.

  I only read a few messages of the thread.  I sort of "sampled" the
thread.  I hope you don't mind me giving my opinion.  I was scared by
what I saw in a older message:
> void       gtk_about_dialog_show     (GtkAboutDialog *about,
>                                     GtkWindow    *parent,
>                                     const gchar  *name,
>                                     const gchar  *version,
>                                     const gchar  *copyright,
>                                     const gchar  *comments,
>                                     const gchar **authors,
>                                     const gchar **documenters,
>                                     const gchar  *translator_credits,
>                                     GdkPixbuf    *logo_pixbuf);


> 
> >   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.

  But if you don't make it extensible, some percentage of applications
will re-implement the about dialog, probably very poor implementations.

> 
> 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

  This seems reasonable to me...

>  
> And then the widget would display it in whatever way it found
> appropriate. But Matthias didn't think much of that.
>  
> Regards,

  Thanks for replying.  I made my point.  Now I will shut up.

>                                             Owen
-- 
Gustavo João Alves Marques Carneiro
<gjc inescporto pt> <gustavo users sourceforge net>