MVC and GTK

[Paul Barton-Davis <pbd op net>]

I'd like to once again mention that it would be nice to see a roadmap
entry for GTK that includes making the toolkit much more
Model-View-Controller friendly. I would be quite willing to help with
the design and/or part of the implementation of this.

I've just spent several hours having to hack together solutions for a
system in which there are 3 different windows all displaying
"Controllers" for the same "Model", and its really ugly doing this in
GTK. 

The typical solution that I have to adopt is to use a flag that tells
the handler for (e.g) "toggled" to do nothing, so that I can 
safely call button.set_active (TRUE) without creating an infinite
loop. This is not very friendly, and given the apparently widespread
acceptance that MVC is the "correct" way to write GUI's of moderate or
greater complexity, it would be very nice to see GTK+ support this
internally. 

At the very least, we need ways to inhibit the emission of signals
from widgets so that they can be adjusted "silently" when notification
is received that things have changed (e.g. as a result of action in
another view) and they need to be updated to reflect that.

Let me know if I can do anything in particular to help.

--p