Re: Spell checking in GIO

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 8 October 2013 18:12, A. Walton <awalton gnome org> wrote:
> This argument doesn't convince me much. If we want Search in GNOME Shell to
> be spellchecked, you could always just link to enchant for that. Clutter
> applications are a bit of an odd case anyways, since Clutter kinda already
> wants to be GDK 4.0, which only reinforces my argument that this really
> should be in GDK.

no, you *really* don't want to add API to GDK. GDK already has too
much API already. GTK+ is perfectly fine for this job, especially if
it comes with widgets, or with intearction with widgets.

> The problem for me is that the only sane way to put this into GIO is to add
> an extension point and load in the spell checking module at runtime (which
> pretty much everyone agrees in the thread).

whether or not this API should be implemented through extension points
is completely orthogonal: GIO extension points are a public API, and
can be defined and used from GTK as well.

> GDK, on the other hand, already links to the necessary dependencies on
> Windows and OS X and we'd simply be adding a singular hard dependency on
> enchant (or reinventing it ourselves), which most distros aren't going to
> complain about (they already package enchant), most users aren't going to
> complain about (except the users that hate features; I'm certain we can get
> some GNOME Haters in on this), and most developers aren't going to complain
> about (since they're probably already using an Egg'd version of
> SexySpellEntry or linking their applications to enchant anyways).

I prefer having direct dependencies only for API that expose types in
the GTK API: Cairo, Pango, ATK. if we don't expose any data type from
Enchant (and we probably shouldn't) then I'd prefer to have that
dependency hidden via an extension point — especially because if
Enchant is unmaintained we may want to start using something else in
the future; or we may want to use something else on another platform.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/