GDL future

[Vincent Geddes <vincent geddes gmail com>]

Lately, I have taken a keen interest in helping out with libgdl and it's
docking widget.

My goal is to get libgdl accepted as an external dependency for the
proposed GNOME Developer Tools suite. An even greater prize would be to
get GDL's docking widget directly into GTK+ eventually.

Before any of these goals can be realised, I feel that it would be
advantageous to refocus GDL around the docking widget only.

The other components (GdlDataView, GdlIcons and GdlCombo) are
increasingly becoming old and unused. Some of these components depend on
GNOME libraries (libgnomevfs, etc). This adds redundant complexity to
the package, as it must provide a shared library that depends only on
GTK+ and another one that depends on GNOME [1].

The benefits of my proposal are:

* Focusing on the docking widget alone would bring new momentum to
  the project. We could brand GDL as "libgdl - GTK+ Docking Library".
  New developers would be more easily attracted to help out with the 
  code.

* Depending solely on libraries under GTK+ in the stack.
  Increased portability, less unwarranted autotools complexity
  (see [1]), and less hassle for downstream distro packagers.

* Isolation of the docking widget, where we can work without
  distraction to get it into good shape for inclusion into GTK+.

* Less code to maintain by removing the following components:
  - The GdlDataView component is very specialised, and to my knowledge  
    no project uses it. From the ChangeLog, it looks as though the
    component was last _actively_ developed in 2002.
  - GdlComboButton is a simple 2-file GtkWidget. Could easily be
    included directly in projects that want it. Again, I don't think
    any other projects actually use it.
  - GdlIcons is a simple 2-file GObject. Anjuta uses it, so we could
    simply move it over to the Anjuta repository.

So my question is, how does everyone feel about reducing GDL to the
docking widget and removing the dependency on GNOME? It's not much work
for me, and I believe the change will be good for the future of the
docking widget.

regards

Vincent