widgets, widgets, and more widgets

[Brandon Long <blong fiction net>]

Thoughts roaming around my head.

With some recent questions on the list, and the GtkMyToolbar widget, it
occured to me again that it would be very useful, as there are more and
more third party widgets available, to make using these widgets easier
for other developers.

Currently, finding out a widget exists is rather difficult, you
basically need to pay attention on gtk-list or other lists.

Certainly the widget repository at
http://hegra1.mppmu.mpg.de:8000/~gonzalez/gtk/gtk.html is a start, but
it should probably be pointed to somewhere on www.gtk.org, or possibly
even hosted on gtk.org.

Even with this, it boils down to copying the widget into your source
code, which isn't that difficult with C, but is more difficult with
other languages.  Additionally, it makes it more difficult for the
developer, as she needs to check what the latest version of the given
widget is.

What we need is some way to have a "widget component library", possibly
as a collection of loadable modules.  Perhaps even the gtk library
itself should be split up into core modules and other modules, such that
a bugfix for clist doesn't need to rev the whole library.

Possibly something so far (though this may be more Gnome level) as to
compile to an interface, and if loading of that module fails on
run-time, a dialog to download it from the repository.  Hmm, ok, maybe
I'm getting more far fetched here.

In any case, what about the possibility of a libgtkmore library, or
libgtkextra, combining a bunch of the third party widgets?

Brandon
-- 
Brandon Long (blong@fiction.net)             [http://www.fiction.net/blong/]

"You mean the computer's making this up as it goes along?"
"You might put it that way."
"Well, that does make me feel a little better.  I thought I was the only one."
-- Col. Graff and Major Imbu, _Ender's Game_