EEL vs. GAL

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

Hi,

I notice that there are now two libraries with the same purpose in
GNOME CVS: EEL and GAL. Both are free and open, but essentially
libraries created to optimise code reuse inside a certain company (and
its associated community of external developers), not inside the GNOME
community as a whole.

Am I the only one to think this is suboptimal?

EEL and GAL should merge. Both intend to be some kind of "libgnomeui
level 2" -- why not go ahead and just do it?

At a quick glance, EEL contains following components:
- smooth text widgets
- a powerful canvas widget with assorted supporting widgets, such as
  an ellipsising text field etc.
- some font management stuff
- a password dialog
- a radio button group widget
- a wrapping table
- an extended CTree
- some GTK+ extensions to support it all
- some GNOME VFS extensions
- XML utility functions

GAL contains:
- a paned widget
- very powerful tree and table widgets
- a powerful text widget
- menu utilities
- the E Shortcut Bar
- a reflow widget
- GtkComboBox and some premade boxes based on it
- XML utility functions
- other utility functions

I surely missed some stuff here, but it looks like these libraries
could and should be merged into one. The XML utilities, the
reflow/wrapbox, the tree widgets, etc. overlap at least a bit; and
IIRC there is ellipsising somewhere in GAL, too.

People having to agree on what to put in that common library will also
prevent the wheel from being reinvented too often and keep the library
from bloating. As it is now, basically Ximian and Eazel seem to put
into "their" libraries whatever they see fit for further reuse by
company projects.

For the future, having two companies agree on that library will
prevent further corporate players from pulling their own EEL or GAL
again and make them work towards the goal of improving the common
library. Code review from more people coming from different corporate
cultures will also help make the code cleaner and even more reusable.

On the user side, it would mean less memory usage, one less
dependency, and less confused users worrying about corporate
influence. The existence of Ximian and Eazel alone is already the
cause of much FUD, and I think it's in the best interest of any
company to keep their profile low in the "neutral" areas of the GNOME
system core.

Note that
- I am not claiming that the GAL/EEL dualism is evil -- it's just not
  as good as a common library would be.
- I am not thinking that this is an urgent issue, but it's nothing to
  be left alone for long, either.
- I am not proposing to do the merge myself, since I'm neither a
  Ximian developer nor an Eazel developer.

I'm just an observer. Call me a nuisance if you want :).

mawa
-- 
Wenn die Wochentage Länder wären...
...dann wäre der Samstag Jamaika.