Re: 2.2 and 2.4 features?

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

> I'd like to give my readers a little tentative overview about what
> will change in 2.2 and 2.4, especially API-wise.
> 
> What are the major new features targeted for those releases?
> 
> I understand some of the libegg stuff will land then -- we'll probably
> have a new file selector and a new tool bar / menu bar system in 2.4,
> but they won't be ready for 2.2.
> 
> Is there anything a GNOME developer can look forward to in 2.2?
> Speculation is OK.

I'm not sure how much this has been discussed, but some minor API changes
that might be useful for (most likely) 2.4 (or later) would be:

1. Currently gconf saves some preferences with full pathnames, so if I
   have a shared home directory that I use across two machines, and Gnome
   is installed in two different locations, my preferences for all such
   things will obviously break.
   
   It would be nice to modify gconf so it doesn't save the full path,
   but just the relative path from GNOME_HOME or somesuch environment
   variable.  It would be nice if gtk provided a helper function to get
   the full path so that user applications don't have to know about the
   GNOME_HOME environment variable, etc.
   
   This way Gnome would work better across distributions, so it would 
   work nicely if I have a RedHat box and a Solaris box with a shared
   home directory.
   
2. Currently some applications make calls to Pango directly.  It might
   be nicer if there were gtk wrapper functions so that applications 
   didn't have to know if they were using Pango or not.  This way if
   someone wants to hack gtk+ to use a different Font rendering engine,
   it doesn't require changes in all Gnome applications.  Having said
   this, Sun doesn't have any specific plans not to use Pango.  
   However, it seems desirable to have such freedom.
   
Just some thoughts/ideas/etc.

Brian