Re: Adding gtkparasite to gtk?

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Tue, 2012-02-14 at 16:25 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> I think gtkparasite is a really useful tool for GTK developers. It's
> currently hosted in github,

Do you mean the code linked here:

https://github.com/chipx86/gtkparasite ?

>  and the upstream seems unwilling to port
> to GTK3,

Why?

> I'm going to suggest merging in gtkparasite to modules/ in gtk. This
> means it's kept up to date with the latest GTK codebase, and we can
> start to recommend its use to developers and hackers. So, any
> objections?

Do you see this as something built by default?  Because then it would
introduce a whole new build dependency cycle =(  Currently:

https://github.com/chipx86/gtkparasite/blob/master/configure.ac

It depends on pygtk, which depends on gtk+.   Also having GTK+ ship
a module which depends on Python at runtime is kind of gross; for
example RPM would auto-add a dependency on libpython to gtk2.rpm.
Now it could be split into a subpackage, but then the obvious
question becomes - why not just have a separate project?

If the problem is "too many forks on github", how about hosting
it in GNOME git?  We can easily make things more "official" here.

Also it's worth thinking about some way to use it that doesn't
require being in GTK_MODULES.  For example, it's
pretty easy with ptrace to inject arbitrary code into a process.
gtkparasite could run "gdb attach <pid>; call g_module_open
("/path/to/gtkparasite.so"); call gtk_parasite_init()".