Re: Minutes of the GTK+ Team Meeting - 2008-09-23

[Shawn Amundson <amundson gtk org>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
...
> (if one is compelled to hack on boxes, my suggestion is to leave
> GtkBox alone but add a new nicer container like HippoCanvasBox, its
> features include:
> * have left/right/center/fill x/y alignment
> * you only need 1 "expand" boolean, alignment replaces "fill" with
> something more powerful
> * support IF_FITS mode
> * support children that are requested/allocated but not shown
> * support setting four (painted or transparent) borders independently
> * virtualize the "content" of the box vs. the the layout part,
> enabling many widgets to subclass box and thus automatically be
> containers with alignment and borders
> * and yes, support dynamically setting orientation
>
> Or whatever the nicer features are ... you could call the new
> container GtkLayout since that name is likely old enough to be
> recycled ;-)
...

It might also be worthwhile to look at Tk's packer in detail.  We
didn't get it quite right with GtkPacker API-wise, but it is quite
a powerful model and in a lot of languages it could be made a lot
easier to use than vbox/hbox containers.

-Shawn