Padding, margins, borders and two ways to set them: how does everything work?

[Donald Hoffer <donh564 yahoo co uk>]

Hello,

It appears to me that the handling of padding, margin and widget borders 
is a bit inconsistencies in GTK+. These properties are defined in 
different widgets the reasons for that aren't very clear. For example, 
padding is not fundamentally different from margin, yet padding is 
included in GtkMisc, whereas margin is in generic GtkWidget.

The above becomes really messy when GtkStyleContext comes into the play. 
GtkStyleContext provides padding/border/margin combo for all widgets. 
Based on few experiments, I found out that GtkStyleContext 
padding/border/margin combo is independent from one provided by the 
widget properties. That is, the actual spacing is given by the sum of 
both spacings.

The following are my questions:

How this inconsistency will be resolved? I guess the widget padding/etc 
properties will be deprecated and removed as GtkStyleContext has been 
only recently introduced. If this is the case, will GtkStyleProvider be 
the only way to set such style properties, or will there be additional 
getters/setters for GtkWidget for example?

    Cheers