Re: Pluggable widgets II

[Tim Janik <timj imendio com>]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, Dominic Lachowicz wrote:

> > - If theme authors were supposed to use this API, a lot of crazy (and
> > reasonable) ideas could be implemented. Of the top of my head (from reasonable
> > to crazy):
>
> Wouldn't this run into the following problem?
>
> Themes are unloadable modules. GTypes in themes must be registered on
> a GTypeModule, because the types can be unloaded, re-registered, etc.
> The GTypeFactory would "appoint" a type in a theme to replace, say,
> the GtkFileChooser with the Win32 native file chooser. The user then
> changes the theme. The next time an application calls
> gtk_file_chooser_new(), it crashes because the appointed type no
> longer exists.

no, if themes - or any modele for that matter - is to implement dynamic
widgets, they'd of course have to implement dynamic types properly.
dynamic types don't ever go away, it's just their implementation that
can be unloaded if all references are dropped to it. as long as a type
implementation is in use or if it's needed again, type implementations
stay in memory or get reloaded on demand.

> I was also wondering if we might be able to use this "replace all the
> g_object_new() calls with a factory" opportunity to make GTK+
> unloadable, so that people could use it in DLLs. If, at initialization
> time, one could "appoint" a GTypeModule that does all object
> registration and instantiation, perhaps we could enable that use case
> as well.

no, making gdk and gtk as a whole dynamically loadable would be a completely
different undertaking and is not even remotely being planned for. 
there're simply too many explicit and implicit dependencies in the code base
on gdk/gtk code never being unloaded to even consider this a feasible
undertaking for 2.12 at all.

> Best,
> Dom

---
ciaoTJ