Re: adding deps to libgnomecanvas

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On 26 Oct 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> Tim Janik <timj gtk org> writes:
> > On 26 Oct 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Tim Janik <timj gtk org> writes:
> > > > if this were taken as exemplary code, *every* library that
> > > > contains gtk widgets other than gtk itself will have to
> > > > have a hard libglade dependancy which is pretty unacaptable.
> > > 
> > > The correct fix is to have a libglade equivalent in GTK itself, but
> > > that was rightly punted from 2.0.
> > > 
> > > libglade isn't large, I don't think it's hurting anything. It's maybe
> > > 70K or so. If we only init the Glade module in libgnomecanvas lazily,
> > > you only pay if you use it.
> > 
> > ok, i'll hack configure.in to make that optional then.
> 
> People need to be able to depend on what functionality a library
> exports. If you have libgnomecanvas compiled with an important feature
> turned off, what happens when you later try to use an app that
> requires said feature?

that's in principle the same issue as with gdk-pixbuf loaders in gtk,
which are still optional (up to a point of not relying on png and
breaking the gtk build).

the whole issue is fundamentally flawed, canvas depending on glade,
or glade depending on canvas. what's really required to fix matters
is something like a pkgconfig alike mechanism, were you don't need
the evaluating package at hand to provide support hooks for it.

that's no excuse for making the canvas depend on libglade when there's
no requirement for that though, so --disable-glade is at least required.

> 
> Havoc
> 
> 

---
ciaoTJ