Re: Reg. modifying GTK+ to add menu option

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 1:52 PM, Sindhu S <sindhu oxf gmail com> wrote:


> Can you please answer my following questions:
>
> 1. Do you feel this is functionality is useful? (regardless of the path I
> proposed to accomplish it)
> If yes, is there a more appropriate way of adding this functionality?
>
> 2. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on how this functionality could be
> achieved alternatively that is, without having to modify GTK+?

Hi Sindhu,

first of all, thanks for working on this - we sorely need more people
working on the text parts of GTK+, so your contribution is very
welcome.

Wrt to your questions, as Colomban already said, the alternative is to
put your functionality into a module that would be loaded by all gtk
applications (you can make that happen by setting the GTK_MODULES
environment variable, or with a setting as well). But using modules
has some serious downsides as well (we have to make everything the
module might need available via public api, and there is no good way
for applications to influence the module). And both definitions and
spelling corrections are natural functionality when dealing with text,
so it would be ok to have support for it in the GTK+ api. Even so, we
probably want to make the implementation somewhat modular, either with
an extension point (see gtkappchooseronline.c for an example) or just
with platform-specific implementations of an interface (see
gtksearchengine.c for an example).

I have a hard time coming up with a use case where I could see myself
looking up the definition of something in an entry, btw. GtkLabel and
GtkTextView seem much more likely places for this to be useful.