Re: GtkBuilder status

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 09:47 -0500, Yevgen Muntyan wrote:
> Johan Dahlin wrote:
> 
> >> o My real concern is about supporting menus and toolbars built by
> >>UIManager.
> >>    - Is the motivation here only a "time-to-market" thing ?
> >>    - If so, do you have any plan or stratagy to take baby-steps and
> >>eventually get
> >>      all the ui building code into the IBuildable ?
> >>    From what I've seen, the IBuildable architechture provides exactly
> >>what is needed to
> >>    generate menus and toolbars directly, and more powerfully than the
> >>UIManager
> >>    (does UIManager allow you to set properties on every object in its
> >>heirarchy individually ?
> >>    ... can you refer to an object in the UIManager from the rest of the
> >>glade file ? for a
> >>    random example: Say I want the mnemonic widget on a label somewhere
> >>in the UI to be
> >>    a GtkToolItem).
> >>    Ofcourse I'm not saying that UIManager is bad, its provided some
> >>convenient apis to build
> >>    complex menus and get all that GtkAction stuff in order, but now
> >>that we are introducing a
> >>    complete builder into gtk+, it should be time for UIManager to die.
> >>    
> >>
> >[snip]
> >There should be only one obvious way of doing a specific task.
> >GtkUIManager is the currently the obvious way of creating menus and toolbars
> >  
> >
> Here you go, python programmer in action :)
> 
> Seriously speaking, GtkUIManager is not and may not be perfect. The 
> single fact that it doesn't know that
> an action may need data in addition to callback may make it very hard to 
> use. While it's stupid to use
> glade-built menus in an application which does require merging ui, it's 
> just overkill to use GtkUIManager
> in simple applications that have more than one window: I want a callback 
> to be executed with the toplevel
> window as an argument, and I can do it in glade; but to do it in 
> GtkUIManager I have to break my head
> or arms or write custom GtkAction subclass, or use g_object_set_data,, 
> all in *code*, not in glade. And then,
> there is GtkToggleAction, GtkRadioAction, I need to create the actions 
> themselves, all just because I can't
> make a simple menu in glade. It doesn't sound right.
> 
> >If you have any problems with GtkUIManager itself, start a dialog about
> >that, but it's a separate discussion unrelated to this.
> >  
> >
> It's, err, wrong to claim that another piece of soft is perfect, and 
> make this piece of soft "perfect assuming that's perfect",
> and say "is that's not perfect, complain about it, but this piece of 
> soft will still assume that piece of soft is perfect".
> Are we living in ideal world yet?

No, it's not wrong. If GtkUIManager was part of some other system,
then maybe we might want to work around its problems, not try to fix
them.

But that's not the case here. Its part of GTK+.

glade or replacement UI builders will suck much more if there are two
ways of creating menus in them. Inevitably.

						Owen