Re: [Nautilus-list] Desktop background, fixes and hacks

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Tuesday, July 24, 2001, at 09:59  AM, Owen Taylor wrote:

> Remember, EelBackground knows nothing about its target drawable --
> eel_background_get_desktop_background_window() is in
> libnautilus-private. (It may have been a casualty of global
> search-and-replace?)

My mistake. It's bad to have functions with an eel_ prefix in Nautilus. I 
didn't see that creep in at the time it happened.

Looking at it in more detail, I didn't realize how contorted the code had 
become as the Nautilus hackers worked to make it do the right thing for 
the desktop window (I did the original version, but lost track there at 
the end). And there's absolutely no need for anyone to tackle untangling 
this right now.

> So, barring a fair bit of code reorganization, I'm not quite sure
> how to do it.

If nothing else, it seems that it would be quite straightforward to have a 
call to make through Eel to ask if the canvas can support the pixmap hack,
 and to set up the hack if it does. No code restructuring required, and 
the details of the hack are concentrated better in Eel.

> The reason for the g_module hackery is mostly that adding new API in a
> Red Hat specific patch is quite dangerous ... if someone upgrades from
> our 1.2.13 to, say 1.2.14ximian, then things break without RPM
> noticing.

Two thoughts on this.

1) If people really notice the extra speed from the Red-Hat-specific patch,
 then you've locked them into a Red-Hat-specific gnome-libs too. If they 
find that they need to install a newer gnome-libs from somewhere else for 
any other reason, it will have the side effect of slowing Nautilus down. I 
worry about having this noticeable speedup in a two-module 
Red-Hat-specific patch for this reason.

2) The g_module hackery would also let us release the new Nautilus without 
having to wait for the new gnome-libs release and would let people deploy 
the new Nautilus even if they are unwilling to upgrade gnome-libs.

But these are really minor points. I just wanted to air them.

    -- Darin