Re: GNOME 2.0 planning: A longer range roadmap

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com> writes: 
> I'll add
> 6) gcolorsel2 & libgcolorsel2 ?
> The colour combo boxes in GAL should get synced with this if this is
> to be the colour selector.
> 

GtkColorSelection has a revamped UI in GTK 2, is there a problem with
it? (Has anyone even looked at it or considered color-selecting UI
issues from an end-user standpoint? Jonathan and Federico spent a lot
of time working on it.) It does have some API bugs I just put in
Bugzilla, http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51174, but those
will get fixed. In any case, if there are UI flaws, someone should fix
them. It is true that the widget needs to save its palette in a shared
location, but that's just a matter of a trivial extension in
libgnomeui, which is what we intended.

I really think gcolorsel was probably feature complete 2 years ago,
I'm not sure it needs full-time maintenance! I'm looking at the size
of the gcolorsel2 and libgcolorsel2 modules and thinking "this is
something that is massively overengineered." Is this really going to
help users? I mean, you are _picking a color_. For the GIMP a really
complex widget might be nice (and they have a custom one). For a
spreadsheet... come on. I don't think the perfect pale fuschia is
really required for one's financial report... people want a quick and
easy way to find "red" I'm guessing. Or maybe "black" for that
particular kind of report. ;-)

People keep saying the purpose of libgnomeui is consistent UI, and
then turning around and reinventing widgets that really are perfectly
good in GTK and overcomplicating stuff that should be simple from both
the end-user and app programmer standpoint. I really question whether
we should be complicating our software in this way. Just because we
have a lot of devel platform features doesn't mean you need to use an
exhaustive list of them in each and every widget...

Regardless of that rant, given its size, gcolorsel2 should DEFINITELY
be in a separate module as it is now. Blatant candidate for a Bonobo
component rather than libgnomeui inclusion. And you can't say
gcolorsel2 is unmaintained, that's for damn sure, so I don't think we
need it in libgnomeui to get it maintained...

Havoc