Re: Maintaining / Helping out on Dia

[Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org>]

On Wed, 2018-12-05 at 11:34 -0500, Alejandro Imass wrote:

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 3:50 AM Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org> wrote:

On Tue, 2018-12-04 at 22:20 -0500, Alejandro Imass wrote:

The Gtk3 -> 4 transition should be much smoother, just a bit monotonous

I have heard of people suggesting to use JSX for GTK 4, so not sure why the "shit" comment about React earlier. In fact, React would probably be the best bet of survival or rebirth for DIA. But heck what do I know, right ?

That's more of a general play with GObject and is unrelated to Gtk4 (And nobody is seriously suggesting we scrap Dia and start again in _javascript_ are they?)

Well, actually I did suggest that, at least that we discuss the different options and listen to the users to where they want this product to go next. 

My comments are just general and I haven't honestly looked into the technical details and up to this point. 

You seem to know exactly what needs to be done to get through the GTK 2 bump, and it awesome that at least someone does and understands the urgency to AT LEAST bump it up to GTK 3. We use DIA on daily basis and don't want to see it die. So we could cough up some cash and finance some of this effort.

I'll investigate what the policy for that is (don't want to get anyone is trouble esp myself)

In your opinion is is too crazy to suggest separating the UI/UX from the logic and salvaging the C code, templates and all the other non-UI stuff  as a "backend". 

It seems reasonable to have a more formal split between Dia & libdia but I'm not sure it's worth reimplementing the UI in JS.

To implement the UI in anything other than C/Vala would make the build quite complex and we would lose the advantage of compile time checks however we should be able to somewhat simplify the UI implementation by taking advantage of GtkBuilder (once we make it to Gtk3) to define our UI in XML but until the Cairo port is done we are largely talking hypotheticals here

Was there any particular reason you wanted to see Dia's interface reworked in JS/JSX?

On a related note: Is anyone using PyDia? Personally I've never got it to work and it might be more valuable to develop a new plugin system powered by libpeas so people can script Dia in Python, JS or others (clearly this a much more long term goal)

-- 

Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org>
GNOME

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