new libxfcegui4 stuff

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Jasper Huijsmans wrote:

> Op ma 23-02-2004, om 20:05 schreef Brian J. Tarricone:

> > i'm going to convert xfdesktop to use GtkIconTheme for its icon 
> > searching needs, and jean-francois: i'd suggest you modify 
> > xfce4-menueditor to use it as well.
> > 
> 
> This is excellent. I'd like to try and implement the panel icon theme
> code using this as well. Time permitting, naturally.

ah, i hadn't thought of that.  good idea.  just a note - it looks like 
GtkIconTheme automatically appends the currently selected theme to its 
search paths, so you don't need to add the theme-specific path.  so 
doing:
gtk_icon_theme_prepend_search_path(itheme, "/usr/share/xfce4/themes");
should do the trick.  hmm, that reminds me... _i_ should do that...

> > second is a GtkImageMenuItem subclass i wrote, XfceAppMenuItem.  here's 
> > the summary from my cvs commit message:
> > 
> > XfceAppMenuItem is a subclass of GtkImageMenuItem.  its purpose is to
> > represent an application that is run by selecting the menu item.  it
> > handles themed icons mostly automatically and can be generated manually
> > from app name, command, icon name, etc., or automatically from an
> > XfceDesktopEntry.
> 
> Interesting. I wonder if I could use a similar representation for panel
> launchers ...

possibly not a bad idea...  i presume right now you're just making 
normal buttons, setting an icon, connecting a signal to a function that 
runs a command, etc...?  if that's the case, i'm not sure if you'd 
benefit all that much.  my main annoyance with xfdesktop was the need to 
keep track of and free all that stuff in the MenuItem struct later on.  
i dunno, depends on if you think it's worth it.

> > on the other hand, i'm wary of dumping lots of stuff into libxfcegui4 - 
> > i doubt anyone wants to see it turn into something huge like one of the 
> > gnome libs.  
> 
> Yeah, this is indeed a problem. Beside the panel and xfdesktop I don't
> see much use for it, but code duplication sucks. Perhaps making it a
> gmodule installed by xfdesktop could work...

that's not a bad idea.  tho it's not exactly clear to me that it 
definitely would be xfdesktop's job to install the gmodule.  i know 
xfce4 only has desktop menu access via xfdesktop right now, but in some 
ways it feels more logical to me for the menu to be a part of the panel.  
whatever, i'm arguing useless semantics.  i guess the better way to look 
at it is that i think both the panel and xfdesktop would have equal 
'desire' to have the ability to display the desktop menu.

> netk stuff is renamed libwnck from GNOME. Olivier decided to include it
> in libxfcegui4 to reduce dependencies. At that time the library wasn't
> all that stable, I believe. I'm not sure how it is now.

ahh, i thought it looked familiar...  personally i'm not a fan of 
duplicating code just for the sake of reducing dependencies.  i think 
dependencies are a distro issue, and if average joe user is having 
problems with deps, they should be complaining to their distro.  at any 
rate, people with an apt-based or bsd-ish-ports system should have no 
problems with dependencies.  it would be nice if redhat and mandrake 
would start packaging apt-rpm with their distros by default...

as for the stability... well, the last time i messed with libwnck (about 
a month ago), you still had to #define WNCK_I_KNOW_THIS_IS_UNSTABLE in 
order to actually compile things against it... and it looks like the 
headers installed on my machine still have that in there.  so that's 
probably not a good sign ^_~.

	-brian