becoming embebbed

[Antonio Campos <acampos ceronet com>]

Those days, I have heard in the list some discussion about porting
GTK+(GDK/windowing system) to embebbed devices.
One of the problems that arises in these cases is memory (being this
primary or secundary, both matter) usage, that has to be minimal.

Well, I think that a "problem" of GTK in this case is that it has many
widgets that sometimes aren't "so" useful in embebbed devices, like:

GtkDialog, GtkColorSelectionDialog, GtkInputDialog, GtkFileSelection,
GtkFontSelectionDialog, GtkColorSelection, GtkGammaCurve, and may be
others...

Why are these not so useful? IMHO a widget that is not a layout widget,
a button, a menu, a tip, etc, I mean, a widget that is not a BASIC GUI
component is redundant on these devices, because they're very tied to
something that has nothing to do with these devices.
For example, does the GtkFileSelection have any sense in these
devices? I think not, because many devices may not have even files...
Does the GtkColorDialog have any sense? I'm thinking now of B&W devices,
and then, a RGB color picker is not very useful there.
Let's not talk about the GtkFontSelectionDialog that is completely tied
to X. (What's the sense of the GtkFontSelectionDialog on Win32?)

Even more, do these widgets really have sense in the GTK library itself?
I mean, not only in embebbed devices.

So my ideas:

It would be nice for GTK+1.4. that the GTK library contained only the
BASIC GUI widgets, with which you can construct any GUI application
without getting yourself in the terrain of GNOME widgets (more
specialized), or special-embebbed-devices-designed widgets, or widgets
specialized in a determined OS.
The rest of GTK widgets, (the ones I numbered above, among others) could
form part of other library: namely a GtkExtraWidgets or so.
So, people can use a very lightweight library of basic gui widgets that
are assured to work well from embebbed devices to workstations with
hundreds of MB. And, at the same time, if people wants to use a special
widget (more specialized on the system, or maybe a very complex widget,
like the text widget), one has the possibility of using the
GtkExtraWidget library or even one built by himself, without having to
insert the widget in the main GTK distribution.
I say this because I'm becoming scared of widget reduplication between
GTK and GNOME. And that is because GTK is putting the nose where it's
not called.



The above is meant to be constructive criticism ;-)