Re: [gtk-list] Thirdparty widgets and Guile

[Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds kjahds com>]

On 1 Nov 1997, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> what do you think about this?
> 
> Wrapping 3rd party widgets
> --------------------------
> 
> When writing new widgets for Gtk you should provide a stylized
> description of them, just like the core Gtk package provides
> "gtk.defs"
> 
> Write your own defs file and install it along with the new widgets.
> If your widget (or the package of all widgets that you want to treat
> as one unit) is called "foo", call the defs file "foo.defs" and
> install it as <prefix>/share/gtk/foo.defs
> 
> The format of the defs file is not yet documented, but will be some
> day.

This is fine, and I intend to support this sort of thing in Perl.

However, some of the dynamic stuff may not be feasible to support,
generally, unless the *.defs file encodes far more information, to allow
an extension to be automatically generated. My module currently has to
define structure (and union) manipulations by hand, and many function
definitions could not be automated, especially those with multiple output
values, and GList parameters. I fully expect that this will be resolved
with time. 

A more subtle problem is the namespace issue. Currently my Perl module is
called "Gtk", with the Gdk binding being subsidiary "Gtk::Gdk", to prevent
namespace pollution. Will each third-party gtk widget library have a name
that meets Perl namespace requirements? (Unique to 8 letters, not
case-sensitive, can have sub-names) Perhaps there should be a registry.

-- 
Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)