Cleaning up libxfcegui4...

[Olivier Fourdan]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> libxfcegui4 was extended with more and more stuff since the pre-4.0
> days, and now contains probably more deprecated functionality than
> useful functionality. Also, half of the library is not useful to many
> applications (the netk stuff), while some applications like xfwm4 need
> only the netk stuff and not the rest (well, the event filter stuff, but
> that in turn is only used by xfwm4 so it should be moved to xfwm4).

Oh no, xfwm4 doesn't rely on a single "netk" function. All of the 
taskbar, pager do, not the window manager that implements itw own event 
loop (fortunately).

The window manager indeed uses the event filter (which is mostly a more 
convenient and simpler wrapper to the gtk+ event filter), but the 
keyboard shortcuts also depends on it.

It would be fixable, though. I can remove the dependency from the 
keyboard shortcuts, as it's a lot simpler than the window manager anyway 
(there is not stacking of filters in the keyboard shortcuts).

> I'd like to cleanup libxfcegui4 this way:
> 
> a) Put all netk stuff into libnetk, and

Better switch to GNOME
> b) Start with a fresh and clean libxfce4ui (or another name, tho
> libxfce4ui would be finally consistent with libxfce4util/libxfce4mcs),
> containing only the dialog widget with the header mentioned in the
> previous mail, and

Yeap.

> c) let libxfcegui4 depend on libnetk and libxfce4ui.

Humm sounds good. The only drawback I may see is that we add more libs 
to load at startup and introduce more inter dependency between libs, 
which tend to lead to "dependency hell" for the users/maintainers.

> This way the cleanup is backward compatible and all apps that require
> libxfcegui4 will continue to work properly.
> 
> Next steps would be to copy app-specific stuff from libxfcegui4 to the
> applications (i.e. the event filter stuff to xfwm4, the app menu stuff
> to xfdesktop4, move handlers to xfce4-panel, etc.).

[...]

> Opinions?

I mostly agree :)

Cheers,
Olivier.