Re: Minutes of the gtk+ team IRC meeting - 2010-05-25

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 12:08 +0200, Kristian Rietveld wrote:

> > - GtkRuler (used by dia, claws, possibly xsane; gimp has a fork)
> 
> Is this really only used by dia and claws, or also some more applications?  In contrast to GtkHSV, GtkGamma, etc., I can actually imagine that GtkRuler has some proper use cases in a variety of applications ;)

dia and claws were the ones that quickly turned out in the meeting;
there may be probably more.

> > - GtkTearoffMenuItem (used by a vocal minority, complicates GtkMenu code)
> 
> I have mixed feelings on this one, and I think it is important to make an informed decision on this and not to rush it, because when it has been removed, it is really gone.

well, since I am the proposer of the removal:

  • TearoffMenuItem does complicate the Menu code - with the contents
being copied inside a new GtkWindow, and the window mangled to appear as
a menu but managed by the window manager.

  • the user interaction context of having a menu floating around as a
tool box is a clear indication of a problem in the overall user
interaction design. I can probably ask designers to chime in here, if I
can get them stop laughing about it.

  • all the use cases exposed in the bug[0] are fully artificial: the
people using tear-off menus are not doing it because the applications
was clearly designed to use them. they are using them because they are
used to them, and it makes user interaction with those applications
easier *because* the applications are badly designed, with huge and deep
hierarchies of menu items. it's like saying that if you put a shock
absorbent material between an hammer and your thumb, hammering away on
it doesn't hurt any more. if somebody would come up with an example of
an application that was designed (and not in the 1990s) around the
concept of tear-off menus, and that was widely used then I would have no
qualms in keeping the tear-off menu widget in gtk+.

  • and even if we remove GtkTearoffMenuItem and the tear-off support in
gtk+, those aren't *really* gone. gtk+ 2.* will still have them, and it
should be possible to implement a TearoffMenuItem outside of gtk+. if
it's not possible, we should expose the API to do so.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602882

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