Re: [gtk-list] Re: Thirdparty widgets and Guile

[Owen Taylor <owt1 cornell edu>]

Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:

> Umm, I have to say that I have no experience with this and I intend to
> just ignore this issue until it screws us.
> 
> I can only imagine that this will be a problem with genuine dynamic
> linking (aka dlopening), not with shared libraries that are linked at
> build-time.

Just because Guile requires building a new interpreter for each module
you add, doesn't mean other languages don't do better ;-) One
interpreter for each module may not be too bad, but what about
combining multiple extensions? It isn't really a GTK problem, though.

> > Third party widgets are also in general a sticky issue.
> > 
> > - If every widget is distibuted separately, there will be a horde of
> > incompatible widgets floating around, and no-one is going to be able
> > to compile any Gtk programs.
> 
> Why should they be incompatible to one another?  Ok, it might be a bit
> naive to try to link *all* widgets that are out there into your
> application...
> 
> I think I'll modify the "build-guile-gtk link" command to allow you to
> specify only a certain set of widgets.

Well, I more meant is that each widget will have a separate version
number, and then when someone wants to compile a GTK program they'll
have to figure out which version of each widget they need, find them,
upgrade them, and pray they got it right. Probably some configure
rules are needed to simplify the process of checking for widget
versions.
 
> > - Perhaps the solution _is_ to distribute everything separately, and
> > just make things really easy to find, easy to compile and very
> > standard. (A mini-CPAN, so to speak, to go back to Perl) But even at
> > simplest level getting this set up would be a ton of work.
> 
> We can at least try.  Unfortunately progress will be very slow on my
> part.  Getting this up to speed will probably require a few days
> undivided attention.  Maybe the christmas holidays will provide for
> hacking opportunities...

What we all hope. We'll also have to find someone to keep track
of all the widgets and maintain some sort of central list/registry.
(Shouldn't be too hard, at least to start with.)

Regards,
                                        Owen