Re: RFC: Adding zlib dependency to libgio

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-11-09 at 23:03 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 6:23 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> 
> > I know you're really interested in cross-desktop VFS support, and I
> > don't disagree with having something like that. However, the fact is
> > that libGIO is an important part of the Gtk development stack, that
> > contains all the stuff that developers that want to write Gtk+ apps
> > want.
> 
> i've written some relatively big GTK apps. i've never wanted to use
> any of the facilities that GIO offers me. how is it central to GTK?
> maybe to GNOME apps? i don't know - I don't target GNOME at all.

Its file access is whats used to implement the file selector, its got
the core interfaces for implementing failable object construction, the
standard async method call patterns, cancellable method call support,
stream abstractions, file change notification, etc.

Its clearly possible to write applications without using any of these.
But its also pretty common that applications/libraries want to use
these.

> > Just like Qt contains all that Qt developers want/need.
> 
> This was one of the primary reasons I chose GTK over Qt. I'll make my
> own choices about libraries for IPC, sockets, UUIDs and the like,
> thank you very much. I was looking for a widget-based GUI toolkit, not
> MFC ....

Nothing is forcing you to use the APIs that are availible. If you want
to use another library for some part of typical application
functionality that's clearly possible. However, it is very helpful to
have the most common application development APIs in the platform as
that gives you: 
* better platform independency by abstracting out the implementations
  (for instance, we have a single content type/application launching API
   but with different implementations on unix and windows)
* similar kinds of APIs
* better integration between the APIs 
  (i.e. they can use each other as needed)
* Less memory use by more apps using the same libs
* Easier to handle security fixes and bugfixes if more apps use the same
  libs

So, while Gtk+ started as a widget library, its now focusing on being
more of a graphical user interface application development library.