Re: [Nautilus-list] Rename Eel

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Wednesday, July 18, 2001, at 05:37  PM, Michael Rothwell wrote:

> Is there any chance that the Eel stuff will get rolled into GTK and/or
> Gnome libs? That will solve the naming problem, at least. :)

Sure, there's a chance.

But note that it's not necessarily true that all the code in Eel belongs 
in gtk or gnome-libs. You have to look at things individually. The eel 
library has a lot of different things in it. Also, there's no one who's 
driving the process of getting all these functions into platform libraries,
 and I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Think of it this way. All these functions were inside Nautilus before. 
Separating them out into eel allowed the Nautilus developers to clearly 
express which of the functions were more general-purpose and was a first 
step toward moving them elsewhere.

But vetting the functions for quality and clear concept and getting them 
into platform libraries is a big job, and it's a job that won't do itself.

If you feel very strongly that these functions must be moved into platform 
libraries like gtk and gnome-libs as soon as possible, a good thing to do 
would be to either find a volunteer who is interested in doing that work, 
or begin doing it yourself. The Nautilus team took that first step of 
carefully dividing Nautilus into the part that's general purpose and the 
part that is truly Nautilus specific, and that's where eel and librsvg 
(and to a lesser extent, parts of gnome-vfs) came from.

Or someone could just move it all into gnome-libs and just do a global 
replace of eel with gnome :-) But I doubt that's going to be acceptable to 
others working on the gnome project.

If there's a particular function in eel that you wish was in one of the 
platform libraries, I know that the library maintainers would be receptive 
to that suggestion, especially since the eel function will provide a 
prototype. That's already happened with a number of functions for GNOME 2 
(more or less), like gtk_window_present.

    -- Darin