Re: GNOME 2.0 planning: A longer range roadmap

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 01:38:06AM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> Now we all need to sign a contract on that July freeze date in
> blood. In fact, let's pick a specific day.

Well as long as it ain't my blood ...

> > 1) Figure out what to do with gnome-stock, it's in GTK2 and it's broken in
> > g-l HEAD.  We can't just use the old code as that used imlib, and I'm more in
> > favour of perhaps doing wrappers that may cover 90% of the cases and wrap
> > GTK2
> 
> Would using the Gtk2 stuff directly not cut it?

It would cut it, but it requires code change.  I would like apps to comstly
compile out of the box.

> > 2) Figure out what happens to GnomeDialog now that we have a capable
> > GtkDialog.  GnomeDialog has actually more accessors then GtkDialog last I've
> > seen (as far as I remember, I may be on crack).  That is GtkDialog doesn't
> > store it's buttons afaik.  Perhaps writing this as a wrapper around GTK2's
> > GtkDialog and the stock icons stuff.  Doesn't have to be perfect, just handle
> > again the 90% of cases.  Or maybe just keep the current implementation and
> > just use GTK's stock icons.
> 
> Actually, GtkDialog now covers the common 90% of GnomeDialog (Havoc
> added a few calls for setting default button, etc). There are still a
> few calls in GnomeDialog that are covered, but I think those calls are
> not really needed anyway. So I think we can pretty much just switch to
> GtkDialog (the one thing it probably does not support is the various
> options in the User Interface/Dialogs capplet, but IMO that capplet
> should die, and as far as I can tell many of those settings are not
> respected anyway).

Again, same reason as above.

> > 3) Figure out a simple way to make GnomeUIInfo wrappable.  Rewrite isn't
> > going to happen of this stuff, we just need to make it usable by bindings,
> > and we need it to keep compat
> 
> There are also the Gtk and Bonobo menu/toolbar APIs. I wish people
> would sit down and figure out the One True menu/toolbar API (my dream
> would be Gtk-level support that provides enough hooks for bonobo to
> make it work cross-component).

Again same reason as above.

> > 5) A nice gnome-vfs fileselector dialog.  If apps are to use gnome-vfs they
> > need a good fileselector as part of the standard libs.  And I think this
> > falls under the emergencies heading.  Wasn't there one floating around
> > somewhere?  
> 
> There are several attempts but none is really usable or at all likely
> to be ready to freeze for July. I think this is something that needs
> to be started in a separate module (I can see it getting pretty fancy
> if we support lots of nautilus features like custom icons,
> thumbnailing, etc) and maybe later migrate into gnome-libs.

Well I don't think we need anything utterly fancy.  What we need is an API
and "an" implementation.  If the API is good we can replace it with a fancy
file selector later.  But I think this is "an emergency" as havoc puts these
things (and has been for a while).  I think we can do a decent one with a
good API by july, and have a good bin compat replacement/enhancement for 2.2
which would be our goal for a good file selector.  I mean if we get the API
right, then it doesn't matter that the fileselector is not the greatest as
it can be incrementally worked on throughout the release cycle.

> > In addition to there it's of course getting GParam support everywhere and
> > replacing things with GConf, and using gnome-vfs where possible.
> 
> These make sense to me.
> 
> Something else that might help is starting to port the rest of the
> platform to Glib/Gtk/libxml/GNOME 2 sooner rather than later so it's
> easier to test stuff. Right now I don't think you could use GConf in
> gnome-libs even if you wanted to because ORBit and oaf do not support
> glib2 and libxml2 out of the box.

Well, AFAIK the patchsets in gnome-libs HEAD should make things work, most
definately for glib2, dunno if we still use libxml1 in HEAD, could be ...

Anyway, GConf IS actually used in gnome-libs HEAD so this is not a problem.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Men willingly believe what they wish.
                       -- Julius Caesar