Re: HIG-compliant GtkMessageDialog

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco gnome org>]

> Another way to make an alert is to create a GtkMessageDialog and pass it
> appropriate Pango markup per HIG.  However, the GtkMessageDialog widget
> fails in several areas:
> 1) Window title is non-empty
> 2) Separator bar is present
> 3) Spacing is wrong
> 4) Specifying required markup is a pain (especially when using gettext)
> 5) Window must be modal only to the parent window
> 
> 1, 2, 3, and 5 can all be fixed inside GtkMessageDialog code without
> breaking the API.  4 is somewhat easy to get around.  5 is awkward to
> do, needing to monkey with gtk_window_groups (could also be done without
> changing the API).

I think there was "compatibility" concerns about changing message dialog
UI in a minor gtk version.

I see two possible solutions:

1 put in egg an EggMessageDialog implementation with the same api as
GtkMessageDialog but with an hig friendly implementation. On that base
we could add more friendly api for hig messages (to take in account the
primary/secondary text thing for example). It could be moved in gtk for
the next major version.

2 create an EggAlertDialog with a different, hig friendly api. This
could be moved in gtk for 2.6 and GtkMessageDialog could be deprecated

I prefer 1 because I think there are no reasons to break api
compatibility with GtkMessageDialog and it seem to be possible to build
a more convenient api for hig like alerts on the top of it.

Better ideas ? Would gtk maintainers support the creation of an
EggMessageDialog ?
Current situation with every app going to implement their own message
dialog api is a mess IHMO ...

Marco