Re: Moving useful stuff into the core toolkit (Was Re: Removing libgnome* from nautilus)

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 20:59 -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Oct 2008, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 14:22 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > > I just branched nautilus because I want to work on a small project I
> > > have. I want to remove all uses of libgnome, libgnomeui and all the
> > > related libs from nautilus. These are not really important to nautilus
> > > anymore, and are a large dependency that we mainly don't need.
> > > 
> > > Hopefully this shouldn't be to much work. I'll start today 
> > > with commiting a removal of the last use of bonobo (we 
> > > currently use it for "unique application" functionallity).
> > 
> > Cool. As a kinda related question what are your thoughts on 
> > moving some of the more useful GIO-related UI classes 
> > (NautilusOpenWithDialog for example) into GTK+? I can see stuff 
> > like that being useful in Evolution, Firefox, Epiphany etc.
> > [YMMV]
> 
> Well, my mileage does indeed vary.  
> 
> I could think of various application-specific things that it might 
> be "cool" to have in GTK from my personal perspective, but I'm not 
> about to try to impose them on other GTK users.  IMO, GTK should 
> concentrate on doing the best possible job on those "generic" GUI 
> functions that are (potentially) common to the greatest number of 
> apps.  
> 
> I'm a bit alarmed by the prospect that GTK should accumulate an 
> increasing proportion of ex-gnome functionality (even though I 
> happen to use gnome myself).  For one thing, one very nice 
> property of GTK from the point of view of an app developer is its 
> cross-platform nature.
> 
adding "gnome" functionalities to GTK doesn't imply removing its
cross-platform nature, on the contrary, it helps a lot, since having
cross-platform implementation so of the most used stuff (open with seems
to be in that group) helps a lot in having GTK used for real
cross-platform development. If you don't have implementations for such
operations, you force developers to use another thing just for that,
which might mean they might just give up on using GTK
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>