Re: Status of configurable global options (double-click timeout, etc.)?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Joshua Horvath" <jmhorvat home com> writes:
> Has any work been done on a scheme for setting the double-click timeout and
> other global options?  I was browsing through the archives and it seemed that
> someone wrote some code for this but I grabbed the latest CVS sources and the
> timeout is still hard-coded.
> 
> If someone is working on this, I'd like to request that the menu select timeout
> be configurable as well.  It's kind of silly to have to recompile GTK just to
> set this timeout to zero.
> 
> If no one is currently working on this, I wouldn't mind writing some code to get
> this into the 2.0 release.
> 

I think no one has really thought through how it should work.

One idea that's been tossed around is special X properties to be
shared by GTK+, Qt, and other toolkits for things like double-click
timeout. This gives us toolkit compatibility and also gives us a way
to be notified if a setting changes. Unfortunately it isn't a very
extensible or general-purpose configuration mechanism.

Another idea is that we would have some generic way to set GObject
arguments from gtkrc, and that some GObject(s) (I'm not sure which or
how this would work) would have arguments for the various settings.
This is more extensible but is GTK-specific and also there's some work
involved in modifying gtkrc from a GUI without messing up anything
people have put in there by hand.

Another random thought is to have some kind of "configuration storage
module" which would let you get/set GValues and get notification when
they change, and that could be mapped to GConf or to a simple config
file, depending on which module you load. But, this also has
disadvantages and issues probably. I guess the necessary API would
include an awful lot of the GConf API (not that the GConf API is
really that big, though, if you only allow get/set/notify).

The approaches could be mixed and matched in various ways.

The main task is probably to figure out how it should work, and
convince everyone else you are right. All the schemes sound pretty
easy to implement once you figure out the right way to do it...

Havoc