Re: Multihead support for GTK

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Erwann Chenede <Erwann Chenede ireland sun com> writes:

> Thanks for the info and comments.
> 
> When is the next API freeze ? 

Quite soon. In fact, we are already in a fairly slushy state right now
for 2.0 - we are not quite finished making changes, but all the
changes are pretty much lined up. To give you an idea of the items
that are lined up, the ones I can think of off hand are:

 - Per-thread main loop 
   (GLib, design prototype implementation done)
 - UTF-16 conversion functions for GLib
   (Implementation done, needs to be tested, commited)
 - Finishing up GObject (GTypePLugin as interface,
   signal convenience functions, some naming issues)
 - Integration of input method module branch 
   (GTK+, basically just integration)
 - New window manager hint spec for GDK
   (Some design, implementation done and commited, but 
   needs finishing)
 - Global and style properties for GTK+
   (Design done, needs to be implemented)
 - Wrap boxes
   (Implementation in BSE needs to be integrated)
 - Kristian Rietveld's Combobox (?) - looks promising
   but quite a bit more work is probably needed to make
   sure it is reallly rgiht.
 - Sorting, DND, and maybe editing for List/Tree widgets
 - Embedded widgets for GtkText. (Mostly done)

As you can see, it's still a pretty long list, but anything without at
least a a prototype implementation is a long shot at this point.

I don't know exactly when we'll declare an API freeze, but we'd like
to get as much as possible of the above in by the middle of November.

This is probably not a realistic timescale for multi-head support, but
I think that the multi-head support is amenable to being done in a
source/binary compatible way. By identifying areas of possible
breakage before we freeze, we should be ensure that we can do that.

We have rough plan at this work to work on various
source/binary-compatible incremental enhancements for GTK+ after 2.0
for a while on a short timescale, and I think multi-head support would
be a good candidate for doing in this fashion.

Regards,
                                        Owen