Notes from GTK+ BOF



We had a GTK+ BOF today (2004-06-29) at GUADEC. I don't have 
complete list of people there. There were about 30-40 people
total, with a good set of frequent contributors 
(Tor, Matthias, Soeren, Anders, Jonathan, Manish, and others
that I'm forgetting)

The first topic of discussion was GTK+-2.6; trying to finalize
a rough feature set.

Some of the possible features discussed were:

 Command line parser; Anders seems to have this pretty close
 to completion. The big remaining question is how we do the
 gnome_init() function of integrating command line arguments
 from various libraries into the parsing.

 The consensus we came to was perhaps a surprising one; 
 libraries shouldn't have command line arguments, except perhaps
 one or two exceptions like --display. 

 Regular expressions; Matthias's stuff based on PCRE still
 isn't quite ready to go in. It needs some actual use, and
 it also needs to be modified to integrate with the Glib
 UTF-8 functions in a more comprehensive way; it can't, for
 instance, handle case-insensitivity beyond ASCII. The
 current idea is to land it in libegg for now.
 
 Icon list. The main open question here is whether to use
 GtkTreeModel as the backend. Jonathan and Anders got together
 after the meeting to take a look at this and decided that
 it was not entirely trivial, but feasible. Anders took
 an action at the meeting to write up the API and status
 of EggIconList and send it to gtk-devel-list.

 Rotated text and labels should be simple if Owen finishes
 up a few more things for Pango-1.6.

 Matthias took an action to look again at his GtkAbout dialog
 work with the goals of a) keeping it very simple; if
 you want any more you can write it yourself b) forgetting 
 about the single function call g_object_new() construction
 and just having some setters.

 Various picker buttons / entries were discussed:

  File/Directory picker. There was some considerably discussion
  of whether such a beast was an actually a good idea; it seems
  that at least *some* apps do genuinely need file and 
  directory selection, and we're better off providing a widget
  to do it well than have everybody do it themselves badly. 
  James Cape was nominated in absentia to write up his work
  as a proposal and send it to gtk-devel-list

  Date/Time. Seems useful, not clear if we have a close
  enough prototype to get something in for 2.6. During
  this discussion the ancient "Time API to go with date API"
  bug (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50076) came
  up. Apparently JP Rosevear has strong feeling about some
  capabilities in this area that should be in GLib, so
  he was encouraged in absentia to write this up for
  gtk-devel-list.

The next two topics were

  GTK+-2.8 plans. Didn't really have any time to discuss 
  this. See http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/guadec5/ for
  discussion of Cairo plans.

  How to deal with the big accumulating pile of bugs. 
  The idea of releases targeted at particular areas
  (resolve/wontfix *all* GtkNotebook related bugs) came up again.
  Should this targeting be for a stable release or an unstable
  release? There's a good argument for doing it for unstable
  releases ... some of the bugs are going to be API bugs.
  But you'd want to apply relevant patches to the stable branch
  at the same time.

  And as a corollary to the last, the question of when
  the first unstable release of GTK+-2.5 should be made
  came up. "Almost immediately" was the thought.

Regards,
					Owen


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