Re: GnomeFont state of affairs

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Lauris Kaplinski <lauris@kaplinski.com> writes: 
> I am wondering, whether fonts should be shared between applications via
> bonobo or custom CORBA interfaces. Theoretically neither of those is Gnome
> specific - but certainly using bonobo would generate big amount of
> complaining. Still bonobo IS nice thing...
>

Bonobo's IDL is in principle not GNOME-specific, except for the canvas
controls and the menu merge. There are a number of large projects
looking for or using component models, and we are going to have to
have a gnome-independent one in order to get a de facto standard, so
this is a good thing.
 
> libgnomeui is actually very tiny library, much smaller than Gtk+. But oh,
> yes, we can get rid of Gtk+ now, using GObjects :)
>

It's mostly not size, it's issues like Windows portability, ease of
deployment, imposition of policy, the minor but increasing in the
future dependencies on a runtime, compatibility across Linux
distributions, etc.

It's also just a matter of perception; libxml, ORBit, glib, libart
have significant non-GNOME user bases. If they were called
"libgnome-xml" and "libgnome-corba" those userbases would probably be
noticeably smaller.
 
> libart_lgpl, libuincode, libxml, probably one day ORBit, bonobo and
> cousins. Without these there is little need for such library at all.
>

Please, use the stuff you need. But of course libart, libunicode,
libxml, ORBit, and for the most part Bonobo are all designed for use
outside of GNOME, quite sensibly.
 
> Interesting, if people would be more eager to adopt Canvas, if libgnomeui
> had been named to libgtkextensions (what is mostly is)?
>

Except for the above-mentioned issues.

> Fact #4: To succeed, library has to be easy enough for 
> (programming) beginners to use. Great lot of free software libs are just
> too complicated, so people find easier to implement their own custom
> solutions. One purpose of Gnome libs is to appeal to beginners - if they
> advance, they usually stick with libraries/techniques they started with.
> 

A good point. I do think that gnome-libs and all the GNOME libraries
in general tend to confuse beginners though; they don't know which
libs to use, and they don't see any rational distinction between gtk
and libgnomeui. It's much easier to learn a single,
documented-as-a-whole framework like Java or Qt or GTK.

So, to me the main solution here is to get high-level, easy-to-use
interfaces into the libraries where they should be. 

Consider this: if GnomeFont and gnome-print are really useful,
shouldn't they be integrated with the GTK widgets? This has been a big
deal with GdkPixbuf; GtkImage, gdk_window_set_icon(), GtkCList, all
these GTK widgets should be able to use pixbufs. If GdkPixbuf still
depended on libgnomeui, that couldn't happen.

I guess the potential for usage in GTK is less for GnomeFont and
gnome-print, but it's still there.

Havoc