[Muine] My first thoughts on the Muine code

[Tamara <foxxygirltamara gmail com>]

So I had some extra time this weekend I began looking at the Muine
source. I have a few questions:

StringUtils.StrCmp () wraps our beloved strcmp () but I don't see why.
String.Compare () didn't work (I didn't look at it that close) but
String.CompareOrdinal () appears to work just fine. One less jump to
unmanaged code is good. I'm not sure why String.Compare () didn't work
though.

Also I wrote a quick little static method to help with getting GConf keys:

public static object GetGConfValue (string key, object default_value)
        {
                object gconf_value;
                
		try {
			gconf_value = GConfClient.Get (key);
		} catch {
			gconf_value = default_value;
		}
                
                return gconf_value;
        } 

This enables us to replace the repetitive code:

int width;
try {
        width = (int) Muine.GConfClient.Get
("/apps/muine/playlist_window/width");
} catch {
        width = 500;
}

with:

int width = (int) Muine.GetGConfValue
("/apps/muine/playlist_window/width", 500);

Which is much more concise and easy to understand what is going on.
However, I'm not sure where to put it so I just dumped it in Muine.

I also redid the SignalDelegates and wrapped g_signal_connect_data and
put it all into a new class called SignalUtils.

This allows us to replace the use of nested classes in Player

tick_cb = new IntSignalDelegate (TickCallback);
eos_cb = new SignalDelegate (EosCallback);
error_cb = new StringSignalDelegate (ErrorCallback);

ConnectInt.g_signal_connect_data (Raw, "tick", tick_cb,
                                                          IntPtr.Zero,
IntPtr.Zero, 0);
Connect.g_signal_connect_data (Raw, "end_of_stream", eos_cb,
                                                     IntPtr.Zero,
IntPtr.Zero, 0);
ConnectString.g_signal_connect_data (Raw, "error", error_cb,
                                                     IntPtr.Zero,
IntPtr.Zero, 0);

with something much cleaner:

tick_cb = new SignalUtils.SignalDelegateInt (TickCallback);
eos_cb = new SignalUtils.SignalDelegate (EosCallback);
error_cb = new SignalUtils.SignalDelegateStr (ErrorCallback);

SignalUtils.SignalConnect (Raw, "tick", tick_cb);
SignalUtils.SignalConnect (Raw, "end_of_stream", eos_cb);
SignalUtils.SignalConnect (Raw, "error", error_cb);

If these things sound interesting to you, I'll post a patch up on
Bugzilla. In some more experimental work I did, I factored out
AddSongWindow and AddAlbumWindow to inherit from AddWindow and I'm
working on splitting PlaylistWindow up into parts (currently I
separated out the menu system).

Speaking of the menu system, why did Muine switch from Glade to
forming the menu manually with Gtk.ActionEvent?

My long term project is to rip libmuine out and use as much managed
code as possible.

Your comments would be greatly appreciated. 

-- Tamara Roberson <foxxygirltamara gmail com>