Re: patch to vino 2.12.0 to remove gconf dependency

[Sebastian James <sjames wmltd co uk>]

Hello Jani,

On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 23:17 +0300, Jani Monoses wrote:
> Hello
> 
> any patch that tries to reduce the footprint of Gnome apps while
> retaining their functionality is a good contribution as long as it is
> not a hack ;)
> 
> Most of the times it is harder to make the changes clean and
> maintainable than simply finding the places that need rewriting or
> placing the ifdefs. For distributors to use this, it should not incur
> extra maintenance burden.
> 
> For the specific vino patch you sent
> 
> * work on the most recent version (2.13.X I think) even if in this case
> they may be the same if vino is not actively maintained

Ok, my mistake. In fact, I originally worked on a cvs version of the
code; the patch will apply to that.

> * split in smaller and self-contained patches. This is too often
> repeated but it really matters especially if the maintainer you are
> targeting is busy.

In this case how many smaller patches? In this case, there was the stuff
I did to remove gconf/gnome deps and then one small fix to do with
configure options. Certainly splitting those would make sense.

> * better than using ifdefs try to see if there are non-gnome libraries
> which can replace the functionality you compiled out. This way there is
> no need for conditional compilation and two binaries built from the same
> source (an easy one here is to replace the deprecated gnome_icon with
> gtk_icon, and that should get rid of the libgnomeui dep. A much harder
> one may be to see if bonobo usage can be replaced by dbus or entirely
> eliminated)

I'll look at the gnome_icon/gtk_icon thing. I'm developing for a
mid-embedded system where ifdefs are good because they mercilessly cut
down the footprint of the code! I understand that too many ifdefs make
life difficult - I've had to do work with some code before where a
typical ifdef count was 215 ifdefs in a 3300 line file!

> * if not all gnome APIs are replaceable, only then resort to ifdefs in
> which case they have to be named appropriately
> * gconf is not the biggest issue here, it's a small dependency compared
> to bonobo/libgnomeui, not to mention that using an entirely new and
> incompatible config format for vino may not be a good idea at this stage

I needed to remove both dependencies. You're right though. libgconf
shared object files consume a total of about 400 KB and the gnome/bonobo
shared object files total about 2.5 MB.

I have 56 MB of space for my root filesystem, so 400 KB of code to store
the 5 or so config settings in vino is still too expensive ;)

You're also right that the config format that I present is not suitable
for integration into the maintained package, being a rather random, line
based file format. I submitted the patch partly in order to comply with
the licence terms of vino, rather than with the expectation of having it
integrated, and partly to see what interest there might be in this work.

At the moment I'm tight on time, but I'd like to do some more work and
use an xml file to store the settings. My system uses libxml2 already
for a number of other things (libglade etc), so this would be a nice
re-use of code that is already present. It would also then be more
worthy of inclusion in the vino code, I think.

> > As this may be of interest to those integrating vino into a non-gnome
> > (esp. non-gnome, but gtk based) desktops or distros, I'm copying this to
> > the xfce and (x)ubuntu lists.
> 
> I removed the xfce and ubuntu lists from Cc as this is not on topic
> there even if there may be interest; in that case the interested people
> should be subscribed here ;). Besides, I think it actually decreases the
> chances of you being answered, as everyone will think someone on the
> other lists will, especially when the subject is not a new shiny feature
> but the boring and inconvenient issue of keeping the memory usage low.
> 
> Disclaimer: I am not related to vino or Gnome in any way so you may want
> to wait for someone more authoritative to answer, but I am interested in
> such changes that make Gnome apps lighter.
> 
> Jani

Thanks for your interest and considered reply.

best regards,

Seb James.

-- 
William Matthew Limited
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www.wmltd.co.uk