GnomeMDI - the \"{u}berreply

[Jaka Mocnik <jaka gnu org>]

Hi - nice to see that all of a sudden the MDI is getting all this
attention ;) I'll try to answer to some of the MDI related questions
that arose recently:

1. I don't really know if GnomeMDI should be moved to libgnome1-compat
or scrapped completely as I haven't checked yet what remains in compat
lib: if GnomeApp and UIInfo stuff remain there (AFAIK, they do), there
is not much work needed to port it to new GTK+ and put it in compat lib,
if not, I don't think it is worth the effort, as the API really sucks.

2. if GnomeMDI is moved to compat lib, then: no, not much work has been
put in the window-in-window MDI and yes, it should be scrapped (I feel
like putting a paper bag on my head for ever wasting a moment on it).

3. as far as the MDI future goes, I wanted to retain only the view
layout (notebook, toplevel windows, etc. no window-in-window ;) and
session management code (which I think are not that bad) and make it use
bonobo stuff for all the UI related work (embeddables and controls) [see
3.1].

3.1 specifically, I want to create a simple bonobo interface for the
children, defining the methods that MDI needs for handling children
(like getName and createView). the programmer would add this interface
to an existing bonobo object (emebeddable, control or something else).
the MDI would be a simple bonobo container app which would query an
object used as child for this interface and use its methods (a natural
mapping of this child/view concept to bonobo would be the use of an
embeddable as a child and its views as MDI views). I'm not sure whether
this should go anywhere in the core libraries (if so, libgnomeui would
be the most suitable, I suppose) or if there is an interest beyond mine
for such an interface, but I will be implementing it for the Gnome2
version of GHex as I will be able to reuse much of the existing MDI code
(view layout and session management) and leave all the UI merging to the
now omni-present bonobo.

3.2 a call for contributions: if anyone is interested in the [3.1] idea
(someone already expressed this desire ;), I'd most appreciate any form
of help, especially in defining the child interface, but other
contributions (like some snippets of code) are very welcome as well.

regards,
	jaKa

-- 

email: jaka gnu org
w3:    http://pluton.ijs.si/~jaka