Adding Tk Canvas tags to Gnome Canvas - looking for inputs

[Skip Montanaro <skip pobox com>]

I'm new to Gnome and haven't yet figured out all the ways to communicate in
the Gnome community.  Please let me know if this list is not correct for
discussion of extensions to the Gnome canvas widget.

I will be doing some work for a customer who is porting some large
applications from Python+Tkinter to Python+Gtk+Gnome.  In their original
application they make heavy use of the tags system that is part of the Tk
canvas widget, and have expressed interest in adding that functionality to
the Gnome canvas widget.  I took a look at the Tk canvas code.  The
implementation of tags looks pretty straightforward, so I was a bit
surprised to not find them already implemented or at least on the to-do list
at the top of gnome-canvas.c.

I hope you can give me a little insight about the decision to not include
this capability in Gnome's canvas widget and what thoughts, if any, you have
about incorporating tags into the canvas widget in the future.  Is the
programming model sufficiently different that tags don't make sense?  If
there are requirements you'd place on such an implementation (API,
performance, etc), I am at this point the proverbial clean sheet of paper.

Anything I implement would be folded back into the Gnome project.  I want it
to have the best possible chance of being accepted so we don't have to
maintain a variant piece of code.

Thanks,

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip pobox com)
(847)971-7098