Re: GNOME libraries 2.xx road map

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

> These include the Bezier Path canvas item, Raph Levien's Type1 font
> loading code, HackText canvas item. The canvas items can go directly
> into the libgnomeui library. While the Type1 font loading is perhaps
> useful without any connection to the user interface, so it might go
> into its own module, perhaps libtype1 or even a more generic
> libgnomefont which would abstract font loading and handling for us.
>
> Correct font handling also means that we would have a dependency on the
> GnomeFont code in the gnome-print module. This is another
> reason for adding a dependency or integrating gnome-print into
> gnome-libs. 

Merging gnome-print into gnome-libs makes sense. However we need to keep
in mind that this will commit us to supporting the GnomeFont API; can we
finalize that API in the next couple months? How far along is it?

AFAIK only Raph, Federico, and Owen have the necessary knowledge to do
this, so this is a potential problem if they don't have time.

> Open for discussion: the current gnome-config program is usually
> invoked with the gnomeui argument and the user will expect the old
> values. Do we want to make the "gnomeui" symbol return the
> compatibility libraries as well and create a new "gnomeui2" option, or
> do we want to have a "compat" option as well when invoking
> gnome-config

Because some "porting" work will almost certainly be required anyway I
like the idea of a "1-0-compat" option. This means our old documentation
(and the intuitive thing to do) will still be valid for from-scratch
applications.

> To minimize these problems, I suggest that if at all possible, the
> various new libraries and components that will be integrated in the
> GNOME libraries is made readily available for other developers to use
> as separate packages. This is already the case for GConf, Bonobo, the
> GNOME VFS, and GNOME-print.

An important point here is that the standalone version of these components 
should probably go away once gnome-libs 2.0 is released.

It makes sense to put gnome-print, gnome-vfs, and gdk-pixbuf in
libgnome/libgnomeui, I think. libglade and Bonobo are more questionable
since circular dependencies are easy to avoid and small simple apps (such
as panel applets) may not use them.

Looks good! I think we are all pretty much thinking along the same lines 
for gnome-libs.

Havoc