[Thunar-dev] Unification of Treeview and Sidepanel

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Jeff Franks wrote:

> Brian wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>>
>> I can start porting the python interface to C and connecting some
>> empty callbacks to the buttons and such.

Agreed with Jasper and Danny that this may not be the best use of your
time.  I don't even want to be tempted to complicate or obfuscate the
backend just to make it easier to connect it to a frontend that wasn't
designed for a particular backend.

>> The only reason I can see for using gtk 2.6 is that there are one
>> or two more stock icons. (Help dialog comes to mind. I believe
>> that mousepad has a preprocessor command that checks the gtk
>> version)

Stock icons are trivial to conditionally add.  Xfmedia already does
this for the GTK_STOCK_MEDIA_* icons if compiled against gtk 2.4.
Easy cut-and-paste job, maybe 5-7 minutes of work.

> There are several other reasons. By the time Xfce 4.4 is released
> most distributions will distribute GTK 2.6 which has a lot of
> improvements over GTK 2.4.

Most *new versions* of distributions.  Xfce is *not* bleeding-edge,
nor is it supposed to be even close to it.  We should at least make an
effort to be compatible with some not-so-up-to-date distros.  I
believe we've already discussed this to death on xfce4-dev.

> For example,
>
> 1) GtkCellRenderText, GtkLabel, GtkProgressBar and PangoLayout
> support for ellipsized text.

Useful, but not necessary, and libexo can do all this.

> 2) GtkLabel support rotated text

I can't think of where this would be useful (or rather, necessary) in
a file manager.  At least not a basic file manager.

> 3) GtkAboutDialog vs XfceAboutDialog

We'll continue to use XfceAboutDialog, since it's distinctively Xfce-ish.

> 4) GLib's GOption API for user defined commandline option parsing.
>
This is a shame not to have, but we can either backport it into libexo
(not that hard), or just use GNU getopt (and include it for systems
that don't have it).

> 5) GdkPixbuf support image rotation

See #2.

> 6) GtkMenuToolButton vs XfceMenuButton

So?  We already have a replacement for it, so we might as well use it.

> 7) GtkFileChooserButton

Trivial to backport, though I'm not sure I see a need for this really
often in a file manager.

> 8) GtkCellRendererCombo

Unnecessary?

> 9) An improved GtkFileChooser widget

Huh?  People that have 2.6 will benefit from it, people with 2.4
won't.  No big deal.

> 10) GtkListStore and GtkUIManager performance improvements making
> widgets like GtkIconView perform better.

See #9.

> Is there any real reason not to use GTK+ 2.6 as the minimum
> requirement for Xfce 4.4.

See my original point.

> May be then a few widgets could be deprecated in favour of the new
> GTK ones (e.g. GtkMenuToolButton, GtkAboutDialog).

I don't really see the need...

I think the bottom line here is that I still haven't seen a compelling
need for gtk 2.6 for Thunar.

    -brian


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