Re: gnome filer

[Tony <tonyt ptialaska net>]

On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Sergio A. Kessler wrote:

> The other day I see an entry in CVS called gnome-filer, and I asked
> myself what the heck is this, so I went to cvs to investigate ...
> 
> wow !  I'm really impressed.
> 
> A clever, simple and powerfull idea.
> 
> The idea of watchpoints is so nice...
> 
> And the data_get() and data_set() has the potential to 
> resolve/standardize all the problems with object accesors
> (or I'm missunderstanding/dreaming here ?)
> 
> really impressive,
> Sergio

Why, thank you.  David Orme and I have been working hard on this thing
over the last few weeks.  It's still in the larval stage, of course.

I'm not sure what you mean by "object accesors."  data_get() and
data_set() really only provide the same functionality as
gtk_object_[g,s]et_data(), except providing for watchpoints; the only
reason we decided to use a separate data space was to differentiate
between private (gtk_object_[g,s]set_data()) and public (data_[s,g]et())
dataspaces.  The original implementation was just a wrapper around the gtk
data functions.

I wouldn't mind seeing watchpoints implemented within Gtk.  However, I'm
not sure of the global value.  It's really handy for us, as we won't
implement signals within our language bindings; even standard signals like
"clicked" will be implemented as watchpoints.  However, I think for most
purposes, signals are more than sufficient, and probably make more sense.

There's still quite a bit left to do, of course.  For instance, I need to
lock the data during a watchpoint, to avoid infinite loops.  (Lock only
the piece of data that triggered the watchpoint.)  And I'd like a way to
designate a piece of data as "read-only" or "write-only."

Thank you for you kind comments.  I'm very excited about gnome-filer.
This is by far the best work I've ever done.  (I won't speak for David, of
course.)

If anyone has any critical comments, advice, or code, please feel free to
contact David or me.  (David is the project lead, and is working on the
language bindings.)

This is not an official announcement, call for help, or anything else;
this is just an acknowledgment of Sergio's message.  But, as usual, we can
always use help.

						- Tony Taylor