Re: property API vs fields

[Tim Janik <timj imendio com>]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2006, Steph Fox wrote:

> Hi GTK people,
>
> The PHP-GTK doc team have hit a point of confusion over the property API in
> GTK 2, mostly because publicly accessible fields hanging over from GTK 1 are
> still publicly accessible. We don't know whether to promote the use of
> *_get_|set_property() or not, and to some extent that depends on whether it
> will eventually be enforced by the GTK+ team.

can you be more specific and actually point out real fields/properties?

> In PHP, the approach makes a difference to syntax; directly accessible field
> names can't contain a hyphen, but a string parameter 'property' passed to a
> get|set function can. Since some widget properties share the name of a field
> in the same widget, I can see all kinds of confusion in store.

property names can only consist of [a-zA-Z0-9-], enforced by
glib/gobject/gparam.c:canonicalize_key(), so property name strings
maps perfectly well on to regular identifier names (with just s/-/_/).

> Short version: Is there a plan to phase out publicly accessible fields in
> GTK widgets, or are you intending to retain them for all time as a BC
> consideration?

again, can you be bothered to point out particular fields?
if you point out concrete cases, you might get concrete answers ;)

> Sorry if this is covered in the list archives somewhere, your search
> facilities are having a bad day (and MARC's don't work for function names).
>
> - Steph

---
ciaoTJ