Re: GNOME Roadmap - Information Request for glade3

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 01:39 +0300, Lucas Rocha wrote:
> Dear maintainer,
> 
> GNOME 2.18 was released ~1 month ago, and we've all started to focus
> on the next development cycle. A new roadmapping process has been
> proposed[1] to know our short-term and long-term plans. The goal is to
> compose a GNOME-wide roadmap for the next stable releases. And we need
> your help to do this. It's important that you take a few minutes to
> reply to the following questions before May 7.

- What are your plans for GNOME 2.20 (next 4 months, before feature and
 UI freezes)?
==================================================================

Stablize the bindings api split, in details that means:

    In glade we've been working on a bindings framework, this allows us
    to:
      a.) Load widgets written in other languages into the glade runtime
      b.) Add some support code in another language that accesses the
          glade core (support code can be specialized ways of
          editing/serializing properties etc.)
      c.) write IDE's in other languages using the libgladeui core.

    Right now glade development is a little stunted by this project, we
    need a clean split between the core and the bindings framework that
    will allow glade to evolve and bindings to evolve along side, this
    is our primary objective for now.

User visibly, we'll be implementing alot of context menu item features,
particularly:
   o Shortcut to menu/toolbar editors ("Edit menus...")
   o Add/Remove parent: in glade-2 there was "Add Alignment" and some
     other ones, we want a more generic approach allowing the user to
     add a parent container (Box/EventBox/Alignment/Table/Frame...
     usefull stuff) to any widget in the hierarchy, also a quick way to
     remove any container from the heirarchy.
   o Add Notebook page
   o Add Row/Column to GtkTable
   o Open to suggestions... things I've missed...

- What are your plans for GNOME 2.22 (next year)?
==================================================================
Canvas Based editor & core refactoring:

   We'll want to refactor the core in such a way that will allow
   widget authors to provide specialized ways of serializing widgets
   on a widget & property basis, also we'll want a way to allow widget
   authors to supply canvas item implementing code to edit widgets on
   a widget & property basis (by "basis" here I mean granularity, the
   author can chose to override one property, or the whole widget and
   reuse built-in properties)

   This also means the widget author will be allowed to introduce
   completely new types of GParamSpecs to the glade core and provide
   ways of editing/serializing them.

- Do you have plans for a future release?

There are a million and one things we can do with glade, lets just
try to do what we can :)

- Do you have any goals from 2.18 that were not achieved? Why?

I dont believe so, 2.18 came out with some crasher bugs unfortunately
but the UI refactoring was IMO an overall success, we will still be
working on improving the UI

Why are there crashers ? mostly because of the embedded workspace,
we've been implementing some workarounds for the moment but we'll
need real support from the platfrom for things to work out well
in the future.

- Is there something that is really missing in our infrastructure or
 platform that would help you?

Heh, yes as mentioned above, a bug has been opened as a workspace
to address this: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430408

- Do you have plans to work on other modules not maintained by you?
 What are they?

Well I have plans to add some trailing widgets to libglade, there's
more details here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387242

I've also been working on the GtkBuilder effort, which is still a
pending issue due to the lack of gtk+ core maintainers... I'll still
be around to fix things up and take care of the builder once someone
from the gtk+ team is ready to work with me.

- Do you have any GNOME-wide goals suggestions for the next releases?

Ofcourse ! Hire me to work on glade and/or gtk for 30hrs a week ! haha

Cheers,
                -Tristan