Re: [gtk-list] Re: proposal: contributed widget standards

[Andreas Tille <tille physik uni-halle de>]

On Sun, 13 Dec 1998, Roland Bock wrote:

> "Shawn T . Amundson" wrote:
> ....
> > Besides this, even if you have a nice template, if you need to tweak
> > the autoconf/automake stuff, it requires a lot of time and understanding.
> > Much more so than a standard Makefile.  So forcing this onto widget
> > writers is not something we want to do.
> 
> After some thoughts: I guess you are right. Forcing the use of configure
> scripts might be a bad thing.
After reading your discussion I think you are not right ;-):
Development versions and stable versions are incompatible.  This
makes a version checking necessary.  What is the best way to do
version checking?  I think the answer is configure.

So why not taking the initial suggestion of Roland Boch to ship a
"default configure stuff" to make it easy for other widget developers.
It took me several hours to write the necessary files for my widget
(which will be made available soon) and mostly I tried to copy from
some examples.  Why not supporting a sample configure.in which does
the version checking etc?  This would safe time of developers and
they could spend this time in developing their widget.

Moreover to find out the use of a new widget a simple example
-- the hello world -- is of great help.  We should enforce the
developers to ship such an example in the testgtk-style.  This
has the great advantage, that if the widget will be enclosed in
the main distribution it can simply serve as an include in testgtk.

Just my two cents

Andreas.