Re: [gnome-love] New URL based "Location Bar" Panel Applet

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

On Sun, 2004-07-25 at 23:39 -0300, Mariano Suárez-Alvarez wrote:
> Hola!
>
> 1) Porting your app to C might be fun, but is probably not worth the
> pain! C is not really a good language to write applications in... I'd
> just stick with python, and concentrate on making your app rock. In any
> case, it is not unconceivable that a python app be included in the
> Desktop release; the case would need to be made and so on, but most
> people do seem to consider python to be ‘not evil’ ;-)

I like the sound of this applet. I would like to see it become a more
useful replacement for the existing 'command line' applet in the gnome-
applets package. But for easier acceptance into gnome-applets, it would
help if it was written in C (and didn't bring a big new dependency with
it!). The issue of whether or not to use a particular language binding
in GNOME, and if so which one (or two, or whatever) to use seems to be a
bit of a holy war recently. I'm not a big language bindings fan (plain C
code rocks with glib etc), and I hate to see unnecessary overhead of
interpreter instances running on a system, especially if they're only
servicing a small panel applet. Scripting language bindings have their
uses (e.g. good for mocking up and testing ideas like this one), but I
am one of those that would like to see GNOME (particularly core GNOME)
stick to the GNU theme of 'everything coded in C wherever
possible/appropriate'.

> 2) OTOH, what you are doing could nicely be integrated into nautilus
> location entries (hit Ctrl-L on a nautilus window) and doing it there
> might be a more natural place.

As you said, you can already do this with Nautilus. My understanding of
this program is to have a small (low overhead) panel applet that simply
launches a file browser, web browser or e-mail program in a certain way
by matching what is input against a set of common (customisable) URL-
style patterns. I would hope that it would be generic enough to invoke
whatever file manager/web browser/mail program either it (or GNOME) was
set to use. I don't think it needs to have anything to do with Nautilus
in particular.

Just my opinions. Good luck!

Regards,

--
Ross