Re: GTK+ Application class

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
[...]

Hi,
    First, thanks for taking the time to think all this up and writing
this proposal - I have some questions/opinions to share on the topic,
while they might be some strong opinions - I'm a hardheaded idealist
kinda guy (its in our nature ;-D )... so please be open and bear with me.

    The first point I wanted to raise you already raised (heh) - it is
a document-based api, and it seems wrong for gtk+ to assume that its a
document based application - if we are about to go ahead with this,
I would opt for the document handling stuff to be an interface optionally
implemented by the GtkApplication derivative.

Secondly - I completely agree that GnomeApp is totally pointless as
far as I can see (one day it must have been a form of convenience,
maybe before glade ever existed - I dont know)... my question is - why
would we want to replace it with something ?

I am wondering what real-life practicle applications the sugested
new class would have,

  - maybe it would help to standardize the way application
    infrastructures/architetures are created/designed ?
  - a way to deffer some global programming logic back into gtk+ ?
    (easy way of implementing the unique instance app stuff and
    maybe session management ?)

Maybe I'm just missing the vision - maybe you could post a couple
of imaginary lines of code that display how practicle/code reducing
this GtkApplication class would be in use ?

Last but definitly not least (ugh - here comes the juice), I am _really_
worried about GtkUIManager becomming the defacto widget generator for
toolbars and menus. Currently; it seems that menus and toolbars are
precieved to be something special and stand-alone - this is somehow
misleading, menuitems and toolitems are actually GtkWidgets also and can
be built with the GtkBuilder as well - much more powerfully than they could
with the ui manager, with the missing link of actions and merging [1].

So this point relates to this thread because - including some kind
of global "application" object in gtk+ and adding uimanager members for
"toolbar" and "menu" is pretty much saying that "this is the way you
do menus and toolbars in gtk+"... since I strogly disagree with this
general approach - I think it would be harmfull to encourage its use.

Cheers,
                      -Tristan

[1]: in the gtk builder mail thread, I did propose some alternatives
that I still hold to now:
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2006-May/msg00157.html

PS: Interestingly, from reading your post and the proposed api,
it seemed surprisingly usefull as a plugin interface as opposed to an
app interface (a big plugin based app like anjuta could use this
type of class to genericly interface with its loaded plugins).