Re: Steps to get to GTK+ 3.0

["Felipe Contreras" <felipe contreras gmail com>]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:30 PM, Martyn Russell <martyn imendio com> wrote:
> Murray Cumming wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 13:34 +0200, Kristian Rietveld wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> We should start to enforce the usage of single header includes and not
>>> make this optional.  Mitch has been working on this and most is already in
>>> place in SVN trunk.
>> [snip]
>>
>> What's the advantage of this? Has this been a real problem for GTK+ so
>> far?
>
> The main advantages I can think of are:
>
> - When you add/remove/rename header files, you don't break all
> applications which directly included them.
> - Application developers don't have to worry about which files
> specifically they need to include, they just include the project header
> file. This makes using GTK+ a lot easier for beginners.
> - If you stop using a widget in a source file but forget to remove the
> include statement, it leaves cruft in applications.
>
> I don't know if it is a problem. But GLib does it and we should be
> consistent one way or the other.
>
>> Many people (particularly C++ developers) like to reduce pollution of
>> the global namespace by including as few headers as reasonably possible.
>> That can also reduce compile times (particularly for C++ developers).
>
> I prefer one header. Like #include <glib.h>
>
> I know it affects compile time, but it simplifies things for application
> developers and makes maintenance much easier and I consider that much
> more important.

Why not leave the choice to the application developers? Something a
general-purpose utility library should avoid is patronizing the
clients, right?

-- 
Felipe Contreras