Re: [OT] Re: Third draft (was Re: defs files)

[Guillaume Laurent <glaurent worldnet fr>]

Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> writes:

> The solution here is to gradually fix GTK and GNOME over time, while
> minimizing API breakage and keeping the API fairly nice in plain
> C. There is really no other way to approach the problem.

I totally agree with you.

> A "thick" wrapper like Gtk-- will always involve some
> manually-written code,

That's understood. I consider it part of our job to provide a better
API than the underlying one, and that can actually be fun. It's when
said API doesn't allow us to do that easily that frustration begins,
or when I have to dig up for some trivial info.

> so if it pisses you off that much you should probably just give up
>:-)

Actually, when you released Sugar, I came about an inch close to do
just that.

> GTK was not originally designed purely for language bindings and can't
> be redesigned purely for that now. You have to understand that there
> are tradeoffs. Something that is good for Gtk-- may be bad for other
> reasons, including niceness of the C API, code complexity, backward
> compatibility, code maintainability, memory/speed issues, etc., etc.

Seriously Havoc, don't you think I'm aware of all this ? :-)
 
> If you can understand that then you can work on productive
> enhancements to the GTK and GNOME code and Gtk-- can get easier over
> time. In particular now would be a good time to contribute patches
> to the HEAD branch of gnome-libs.

I'll keep that in mind, but I don't expect to have the time to look
into the HEAD branch right now. However, your defs file spec is
addressing many of the problems, and George has reached me for advice,
so things are definitely looking up.

-- 
					Guillaume.
					http://www.telegraph-road.org