thought - libgtkprototypes

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

One focus of the GTK 2.2 devel cycle will probably be fleshing out the
selection of widgets in GTK (file selector, sheet, icon list, that
kind of thing).

It would be nice to make these testable in some usable form well
before 2.2 comes out though. If they are in the 2.2 CVS tree, we have
the problem seen now with the text widget, that people can't test it
without upgrading the whole app to 1.3.x. Of course this is
unavoidable since 2.0 widgets require major architectural changes such
as GObject and Pango, but that won't be true for 2.2 I don't
think. Also, due to the strict standards to stick things in the main
GTK tree, stuff won't go in for a long time, further limiting how much
API testing it gets.

So how about a separate tarball/CVS module, libgtkprototypes, which
will be for bleeding-edge new widgets we are considering for mainline
GTK inclusion. Bleeding-edge CVS apps can use this lib pretty easily
once they port to GTK 2.0. Someone could make distcheck it often and
toss it on the ftp site. The lib would be explicitly unstable and
not-carefully-maintained (thus prototypes in the name); it's just a
place for people to hack on things and let adventurous GTK app
developers try them out.

This will maybe encourage people to hack on the new widgets we want in
GTK, since they can immediately get stuff in CVS and start getting
feedback from people. Stuff would go in libgtkprototypes as soon as
someone shows evidence of a clue and some initial working code for one
of the widgets we may want to have in 2.2. Stuff would move from
libgtkprototypes to GTK itself via the normal review process.

We could go ahead and create this module, building against 1.3.x, so
people have a good place to hack on widgets without breaking the
freeze for 2.0. That way people can go ahead and get started on 2.2
while we finish up 2.0.

Opinions?

Havoc