Re: Generic undo stack for GTK+

[Philip Chimento <philip chimento gmail com>]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 7:40 AM, Holger Berndt <berndth gmx de> wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:57:44 +0200 ecyrbe wrote:
>> [...]
>> Anyway, i don't see the value of adding it to GLib, as undo
>> frameworks are only an abstraction, and users end-up doing the
>> painfull job of implementing undo commands for every type of objects
>> or actions they are putting in the stack or the tree.
>
> Aeh -- it's a container type. Of course no generic container type
> gets any application specialized functionality for free. Nobody claimed
> that.
>
> What it does get you is other things, for example
>
> [...]
> - You don't have to write the boring boiler-plate code yourself, which
>  is likely to motivate application developers to actually offer undo
>  in their applications.

I usually just lurk on this list, but the thought of not getting an
undo framework in GLib or GTK because of purity concerns is so
unbearable that I simply had to post. Yes, having an undo framework
would definitely motivate me to provide proper undo in my application.
Right now the undo that I offer is just what GtkSourceView provides,
so it only applies to typing text even though there are other actions
in the application that should be able to be undone.

What's more, I have been actively postponing writing a solution for
this because of the noises that I occasionally hear about adding an
undo framework. I don't want to implement it myself only to find out
later that GTK applications using the standard undo framework will
behave subtly differently.

Regards,
-- 
Philip Chimento