Re: Sharing CSS code between Gtk and the Shell

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On ons, 2012-12-12 at 19:01 +0100, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
> The second option is to share just code, in some form, either as a
> private shared library that would be provided by Gtk
> (libgtk-internal?) and developed by both teams, or just as a copy-lib,
> with a massive s/Gtk/St/. I'm not sure what would be the cost of this
> last possibility, but I'm still convinced it would be lower than
> rewriting from scratch, and maintaining two different CSS
> implementations in GNOME.

I think this seems like the more doable approach. The gtk css machinery
is very much not a public API/ABI and it changes a lot internally and
needs to continue doing so. However, just splitting out the code doesn't
really work well as it will conflict with symbol names and GType names
if both are pulled into the same binary. So, we would need some kind of
setup where cpp defines modify the exact prefix on symbols and GType
names. That way we can use two different out-of-sync versions of the
code in the same process.

Of course, just splitting this out will be quite some work, as there are
a number of interdependencies with the gtk+ code...