Re: Devel strategy of the file selection dialogs?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Frederic Brunel" <brunel mail dotcom fr> writes: 
> I've never understood why two important dialogs have never 
> been overloaded in gnome ui libraries to be Gnome-ified: 
> the file selector and the color selector.

Did you read the thread titled "filesel notes" from a few months ago?
Probably on gtk-devel-list and gnome-libs-devel.
 
> Choosing to develop with Gnome is not the same as 
> developping with Gtk so I don't see why we should use Gtk-only 
> widgets. The KDE team has faced exactly the same issue 
> with Qt-only application and KDE ones. When you develop 
> with KDE you *never* have the idea to create a 
> QtFileDialog (or whatever it is called) but instead you'll 
> use the enhanced KFileDialog. Why the distinction between
> Gtk/Gnome is stronger than Qt/KDE? Qt means exactly the 
> same for KDE than Gtk/Glib for Gnome, so why is it so
> different?

It is different. The KDE team has little control over the Qt platform,
so they may reinvent the wheel and create a confusing/duplicated devel
platform. GNOME made the mistake of also doing this historically. But
for GNOME 2 we backed off of it. Because it was a bad idea. There is
no logical reason why there should be a GUI toolkit that doesn't let
you write fully-integrated applications. (Witness the "port" of Qt to
KDE that Matthias did.)

One reason it's a bad idea is that libkdeui and libgnomeui are not
something many programmers and ISVs are going to use, for a variety of
reasons. So we need things on a lower level to be sure all apps are
using them.

The KDE (and GNOME historical) route does allow you to get a new
widget more quickly. But it just does not get you to the right overall
destination, of a unified, sensible, supportable devel platform.

In order to allow ourselves to move quickly without creating a big
mess of library to support, we've invented the idea of a prototype
library, called libegg. This is in CVS now, and is where the file
selector will initially land when someone writes it. Then it will move
to GTK.

If you read the filesel notes thread, it makes it clear how to take
advantage of GNOME features such as gnome-vfs while keeping the widget
in GTK.
  
> So, please try to make me clear about of what you're 
> planning to do about it!

What will happen is that someone will appear (sometime) who will
actually do the work to solve the problem. In the meantime, a lot of
people will complain.

The "filesel notes" thread does a reasonable job of framing what needs
to be done.

So, we need someone to start writing code.

Havoc