Re: What, in detail, the GDK do?

[David Nečas <yeti physics muni cz>]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 02:19:38PM +0100, Joost wrote:
> a hint to 60MB of sourcecode (18.000+ pages
> if printed out) is no good answer to such a
> question from someone new to gtk. Especially
> with all that hurdles like GSEAL to understand
> it.

Someone new to Gtk+ but knowing X or GDI+the windowing bits of Win32 or
something similar just looks at the Gdk docs table of contents and says
`I see' as he notices the familiar topics: windows, rectangles, bitmaps,
drawing primitives, font/text handling, devices, etc.  (Of course, *how*
Gdk handles them still involves ugly technical code, but that's
expected.)

Someone new to both Gtk+ and the fundamentals does not need to know that
Gdk *exists*.  There are many more important things to learn first if
you want to develop Gtk+ apps.

But if he's curious and wishes to study the low-level stuff then, by all
means, he should look at the source code.  But first look at some
overview of X because the influence of X concepts on Gdk is strong and
evident (and due to X's importance and age much more have been written
about it than about Gdk).  Actually, going to MSDN and reading about
Win32 might do too.

> A clue to understanding gtk is certainly to
> understand the difference between gtk.Window and
> gtk.gdk.Window (here in the spelling of pygtk).
> Thus to read and thoroughly understand
>
> http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/stable/GtkWindow.html
>
> and
>
> http://library.gnome.org/devel/gdk/stable/gdk-Windows.html

Aside from the first short paragraph, the GtkWindow documentation is
utter gibberish if you don't already know *what* it's talking about.

For instance, the first paragraph is immediately followed by a
complicated 100+ lines example showing how to do composited windows.
What the hell are composited windows?  (I know, but this is the likely
reaction.)

So, no, don't read this to figure out what Gdk does. 

Yeti