Re: [anjuta-devel] GDL placeholder

[Sébastien Granjoux <seb sfo free fr>]

Hi James,


Le 04/05/2012 06:08, James Liggett a écrit :
> I have a similar problem with git shell, where if you click on a command
> button multiple times, the command panes don't get placed on the bottom
> where they should be. They end up in the center instead, which looks
> really odd. I have no idea why this happens.
Ok.


> I think it would help matters immensely if we tried a more formal
> engineering approach with GDL. We could start by putting together a list
> of things that GDL should do. Then we get rid of anything that doesn't
> fit. This way, we have documented reasons for why certain things are in
> the GDL code.
I have only looked at the part which interest me at the moment, the 
saving of the windows layout (the GdlDockLayout object). From what I 
have seen, the architecture seems good and I don't see much things to 
remove. But I have looked only at a small part and indeed the 
GdlDockPlaceholder object seems unused, I suppose it can be removed. Do 
you have in mind other things those could be removed?


> From there, we should put together a short description of GDL's overall
> design, with descriptions of which classes do what. The idea here is
> that we document everything with GDL so that even long after we're gone,
> other people can come in and understand how GDL works, and why we made
> the decisions we did. From my experience, the absolute worst part of
> hacking on GDL is that we have no idea how it works or how decisions
> were made. Rectifying those problems would go a long way toward making
> GDL more maintainable and easier to work on.
I'm agree that currently GDL is quite unusable due to the lack of 
documentation. But I think I have in mind something less formal, rather 
read a piece of code, try to understand it then modify it and document 
the result. I prefer to play with a part of the code and understand it 
piece by piece.
I plan to change the GdlDockLayout item to keep track of hidden dock 
items. So when saving a layout, instead of clearing the old one, I would 
rather mark all windows as hidden and try to merge it with the current 
layout.
I have seen that currently, it uses libxml2 which is a good and stable 
library but I think it's not really necessary for such a simple usage. 
So perhaps it could be better to use the xml parser integrated inside 
GLib allowing to remove this dependency.

> What does everyone think about this?
I have planned to improve the saving of the layout, gain some knowledge 
about GDL and then look at the bugs as I don't think there are really 
critical bugs.

Regards,

Sébastien