Re: Exciting GNOME?

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 19:36 +0100, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
> Anything besides obvious "it needs to be distributed separately" thing?
> Does the fact that engines are compiled binaries ever cause compat
> problems?

There are always going to be compat issues, binary or not. You either
have a binary API or a string API, or some other API, that will require
compatibility on some level.

> On a related note, there was one (vague, but nevertheless very
> desirable) point on GTK+ 2.8 TODO list: "now we have cairo and all the
> goodness, make theme engine that would be far more flexible and allow us
> to specify declaratively what's currently being done via engines, fix
> all the currect shortcomings of theming and then get rid of all other
> engines". Is that still on radar, or got slipped into some unspecified
> future?

I personally don't care if metacity gets engines or not. It seems to do
well enough without them for now. However, I am very against removing
them from GTK+. There's nothing special that cairo gives us, that would
make removing the ability to have engines, any more possible than it is
now. In fact, I would prefer that they get extended, so that new widgets
can specify custom drawing routines. Sometimes, you need to completely
change the math/layout of a widget to get real themability.
Unfortunately, we don't have that.

-- dobey