Re: [gtk-list] Re: Repeat: Clicking on widgets - consistencyquestion

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

I think we can take from that that Gtk's internals need much more
extensive documentation - it's hard to disagree with you there.  Right now
about all there is is "widget-system.txt" in the docs directory.

As you can see from widget-system.txt, a lot of this stuff is very well
thought-out. However, the fact is that most of it was thought out in
private email between Owen and Tim. They are both encyclopedias of Gtk
knowledge and can tell you exactly what the various invariants are and
when they are supposed to hold. But you're very right that it isn't
written down anywhere. Some of it was hashed out on gtk-devel-list, which
doesn't have archives AFAIK; and some stuff is in off-the-wall places, for
example you can find type/object system info in a file called PROPOSAL in
the guile-gtk distribution. 

It's quite hard to figure things out from the source because lots of stuff
isn't fully implemented; for example, Tim explained to me at LinuxExpo
that most widgets do the shutdown/destroy/finalize thing a little bit
wrong. So looking at the current widgets you wouldn't know how it's
supposed to work.

Perhaps you can offer Owen or Tim financial incentives to write their
brain contents to disk. :-) Otherwise we probably have to wait for them to
get more time in the day. ;-)

You are making an excellent point, and I'm also happy to hear that people
are working on full widget argument implementation.

Havoc