Re: gnome-terminal macros and guile extensions

[Havoc Pennington <hp Mcs Net>]

On Fri, 26 Feb 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> Hopefully by the time of GNOME 1.1 (which we plan to do in about 4
> months) that fix could make it into guile?
>

If I can go on a tangent, I hope this will be an "applications" 
(core/gmc/etc.)  release rather than an incompatible gnome-libs release. 
(Perhaps this is already the plan.)

What I'd like to see in gnome-libs is a major de-crufting and more of a
design effort, so that it's as nice as Gtk is.  i.e. a fairly major
enhancement. There are several parts to this: 
 - blowing away some junk that should not have gotten in there
 - improving what is in there so it's really nice, finishing 
   the half-finished modules 
 - adding missing features like GnomeFileSelection

Part one is easy and I or whoever can probably do it in a few evenings
sometime soon. The hard parts I can work on starting this summer I hope,
and I'm sure other people will also be interested and have time sooner. 

Anyway, if this is done right it will probably be more like a 9-month
process; and doing half of it in four months will destabilize all the core
applications again, and make it hard to make the apps really nice.

The next gnome-libs should probably track development Gtk too, so that is
another reason to go ahead and think long-term.

But new versions of the core apps should definitely come out in a few
months, and they should be more stable and have more features than the 1.0
versions. The best way to achieve that is to work with stable libraries,
at the very least source-compatible.

IMHO of course.

Aside from these desktop-environment-centric concerns, an incompatible
gnome-libs 1.1 would be a giant PITA from the perspective of application
development. Guppi will probably be becoming pretty nice in a few months,
and sudden breakage just when I was getting used to stable libraries
sounds pretty unappealing. 
 
> > This should be in an upcoming version of Guile if I get off my ass enough
> > to complete the work.
> 
> Oh, please do it :-)
> 

Yes! Miguel you've really hit on the right way to do scripting in the "C
master world" case, with loadable modules - then people can choose the
scripting language of their choice. Probably --gtk-module is limiting, and
any complex app should have its own module stubs, but the idea is there.
And this way users don't have to fool around with scripting or its
overhead if they don't want it.

I am already expecting the "is Guile bloat?" flame war for every single
app, so this is also a politically expedient hack. ;-)

Havoc