Ad-on hook idea

[redhog mini dhs org]

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Follows an idea of mine. Please critisize, extend and change! And please
tell me if this is something desired for Gtk!

 To enhance the look of Gtk, the theme system was created. This enables
users to easily change the look and feel of Gtk programs.
 The feature I am to describe implements something similar in
functionality: it adds an option for users to change, not the look and
feel, but the behaviour, of Gtk programs.
 From the user's view, she'l see a list of installed ad-ons, an uninstall
and an install button in some configure app (Perheaps in the gnomecc). She
may download a new add-on, and install it, and all programs immideately
changes their behaviour to include the functionality of the new add-on.
Examples of possible add-ons: Changes so that a user may scroll a
GtkScrolledWindow by klicking (with some user defined modifiers) and
moving inside the scrolled widget, so that menus dissapears and reappears
when the mouse leafes and reenters the window (What my GBlippie patch
does), etc.
 What is needed to be implemented? In order for an add-on to be able to
hook in its functionality, it needs to know when an object (Of any type)
is created (The rest of the functionality could easily be added as signal
handlers connected to the signals of the newly created object). This is
easiest achived, I think, by creating a global variable that holds an
object, that emits a signal whenever an object is created. WHen a program
is started, the add -ons installed are loaded as dynamically loadable
libraries, and their init function is run. That init function then
attaches some signal handler to that global object.
 This solution doesn't provide for the immediately change option, but at
leaste enables us to create some kind of add-ons. Please come up with a
better solution!
 What is this good for? The main reason for me coming up with this idea is
that I failed to get my SuperCool<TM> functionality hack into the Gtk
source tree. And I can understund the reason - the source should be cept
clean, and not implement a huge set of strange features that only a few
appreciates, or we will end up in some kind of enlightenment :)
 But of course some strange peoples (strange as in "like me") wants those
strange features. If this idea is implemented, they could just implement
their hacks as add-ons, and distribute them as separate programs, that do
not even depend on the version of Gtk (As a patch does), witout disturbing
the Gtk ftp admins with a huge load of unrelevant code, and without
cluttering the Pure GTk Code.
With best regards,
Egil möller

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