Cleaning up libxfcegui4...

[Benedikt Meurer]

Olivier Fourdan 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).

So the event filter is basicly used in xfwm4 and the shortcuts plugin,
but could easily be changed to use GTK stuff directly?

>>a) Put all netk stuff into libnetk, and
> 
> Better switch to GNOME

Use libwnck? Do we have any custom changes in netk*?

>>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.

Well, if we use libwnck, we'd just replace libxfcegui4 with libxfce4ui
(over time). With libxfce4ui being cleaned up, we should actually be
able to reduce the startup time and overhead.

>>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 :)

So, do we want to start with libxfce4ui for 4.4, or better delay that
for 4.6?

> Cheers,
> Olivier.

greets,
Benedikt