Re: Order of widgets when displayed on top of each other

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 10:40, Paul Davis wrote:
> >It's hard to get stuff into GTK+ because GTK+ has very high quality levels.
> 
> it does for additions. yet we've had misdesigned stuff like the combo
> and the file selector around for years. that's where the paradox lies:
> i love the high standards for additions, but it wasn't applied to the
> first round of widgets GTK+ got. ok, i understand the rationale: "we
> know its bad, but we're not replacing with something that isn't really
> good". net result: misdesigned widgets that live for years.
> 
> >That's good. If people want something to go into GTK+ then they have to be
> >prepared to discuss it thoroughly, provide rationale, and go through a few
> >iterations until they get it right. So far nobody has done that for these
> >things. It's not up to the GTK+ maintainers to do it all. Stuff happens when
> >people care enough about it to do it themselves.
> 
> but when there is no sign that you can ever succeed in adding a widget
> unless you are part of the core team, the motivation to try is a bit
> hard to come up with. and that really *is* my perception: if you're
> not owen or havoc or tim, don't bother thinking you can add a new
> widget to GTK+. i know i'm not the only person who thinks this,
> although i'm open to the possibility that its wrong.

I think Murray and others have answered this well, but there is an
amusing observation to be made:

Widgets in GTK+ by:

 Owen: GtkAspectFrame (1997), GtkInputDialog (1997), Gtk[HV]Paned (1997)
 Tim: GtkAccelLabel (1998), GtkTipsQuery (1998) 
 Havoc: GtkTextView

Of course, this is sort of deceptive since Tim and I have done lots
of major work on non-widget subsystems, but we don't exactly dominate
the current set of widgets or the set of recent additions.

Does getting a new widget into GTK+ take a lot of persistance? Yes.
That's generally a good thing -- we'd like to avoid too many more
widgets in GTK+ like GtkAspectFrame, GtkInputDialog, and GtkTipsQuery.

Regards,
						Owen