Re: [Gal-hackers] Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: What about gal && eel into GNOME 2.0?

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

> >   This makes sense.  But on the other hand, I also wish the GTK
> > maintainers were more open to contributed widgets.
> 
> It upsets me that people feel this way, but at the same time I don't
> understand why they do feel this way.

  I didn't mean to attack the GTK maintainers here.  I just wanted to
express a personal feeling.

  I think a big part of the problem is that too many things were changed
from 1.2 to 2.0 and it became impossible to add widgets to GTK for a
long time, because of the migration to 2.0.  And while the GTK
maintainers kinda lived in a happy 2.0-only world and rejected any
non-trivial changes to 1.2, application developers had to write their
own widgets and work around the various problems of 1.2 all by
themselves.

  Now, it still looks like the barrier for getting widgets into 2.0 is
pretty high, though.  For one, I proposed getting GnomeDock into GTK 2 a
long while ago, when 2.0 was just started, and it was rejected.  In all
the time that has passed since then, we could have ported GnomeDock to
GTK 2 and ironed out all the rough edges.  Likewise with the color combo
box.

> Re: these widgets in question, they haven't been proposed for GTK at
> all as far as I know. The only gal widget really proposed was the
> combo widget, and it was extensively discussed and punted to 2.2 for I
> think good reasons. But it will go in for 2.2, it's a high priority in
> fact.

  OK, that's good to hear.  :-)

> I'm not saying I think e.g. a splashscreen or shortcut bar widget
> necessarily _do_ belong in GTK. But if they don't, I don't see why
> they belong in libgnomeui either - perhaps they make sense in some
> sort of "office applications library" or "library for apps large
> enough to have splashscreens and lots of modes to shortcut between" or
> something like that. 

  I still think the shortcut bar makes sense as a general-purpose
widget, but maybe it's just me.

> Anyhow, I would genuinely like to make GTK more open to contributed
> widgets. What do you think of the idea of doing 2.2 as a
> "libgtk-prototypes" library that would have less strict review
> requirements before putting things in, and that people could start
> using with GTK 2.0? Would that help with this problem?

  I like this idea.

--
Ettore