Re: GTK+ brochure for FOSDEM

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 03:14:39PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> Look, I understand that you think that GObject is pretty cool (it is), that
> it, along with glib, can serve as useful building blocks of non-graphical
> applications (they can) and that this fact should be more widely known (it
> should).
>
> But is that the purpose of a brochure on GTK+ ?

It's a brochure on the GLib/GTK+ development platform, not only GTK+.
GTK+ is already well known by advanced Linux users (they at least know
that it's one of the main graphical toolkits used on GNU/Linux,
alongside Qt).

For advanced users it's interesting to know the existence of the
lower-level libraries used by GTK+ and GNOME. For instance the
explanation about GIO and GVFS is useful so that a user having an error
when mounting an FTP volume with Nautilus can better understand which
component the error come from, to better diagnose the problem and report
the bug at the right product/component in bugzilla.

Following the same idea, it'd be interesting to write a "GNOME
internals" brochure that explain how the GNOME desktop works internally,
what daemons are used, what other libraries other than GLib/GTK+ are
used, etc. But depending on the content this can become quickly
outdated, I don't know.

To come back to GLib/GTK+, what would you explain about GTK+ that is not
explained in the brochure?  Maybe single-instance applications, the
recent OpenGL support, some of the important widgets (but this latter
thing, GNOME users already know what is possible with GTK+ since they
use daily GTK+ apps).


Sébastien