Re: [Quartz] Gtk Selection

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Jun 8, 2010, at 6:13 AM, Kristian Rietveld wrote:

> On May 24, 2010, at 3:15 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
>> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 1:21 AM, John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> The structure of that part of Gdk follows very closely the X11 way of doing things, and Cocoa Foundation's way of handling selections and clipboards (which they call pasteboards) doesn't line up very well with it. It seems to me that it might work better to just make a gtkselection-quartz.c and implement everything directly, ignoring Gdk entirely, much as Richard did with gtkclipboard-quartz.c and gtkdnd-quartz.c.
> 
> John, it's really great that you are having a go at getting the selection code working.  If Richard has been bypassing GDK in the clipboard and DnD implementations as well (I have not studied that code in detail yet), then I guess it makes sense to do the same for selections.
> 
> 
>> seems to me that its all about time. ideally, the design of GDK would be modified to be more generic/adaptable, and all backends would continue to use it as an interface. but it seems to me unlikely that this is going to happen in any reasonably timely  way. so if you want this to work (i confess that its not too important for ardour's functionality), i think your proposal is likely right way forward.
> 
> I am really in favor of modifying the design of GDK to be more generic, not only for selections, but for many more areas: DnD, window management, drawing, etc.  Of course, this is a really a long-term goal ...

Kris,

Thanks for the encouragement. It's done, and a patch submitted against https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=571582.
As it happened, I had to touch both gtkselection and gdkselection -- the latter because of the text conversion routines. Fortunately in OSX, there is only utf8 for strings (unless someone overtly codes something else, but why do that?), so the implementations were pretty simple.

I found in my studies that the Gtk widgets don't use the selection interface at all anymore; they use GtkClipboard. There's a recommendation about that in the Gtk Selections documentation, but I suggest going all out and deprecating the selection interface.

Yes, I understand that redesigning Gdk would be a long term goal. Have there been any discussions about what the architecture would look like on IRC? I sure haven't seen any here...

Regards,
John Ralls