using dbus in the platform

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

Alp Toker wrote:
> API goals like "manage the screensaver" simply fall outside of GTK+'s 
> job description. I don't think you understand the diversity of scenarios 
>   GTK+ is used in.

I wrote large parts of GTK. I have been involved with it (and the gnome 
libraries) since at least 1999, helped all kinds of people with 
questions on gtk-list well before that, when GNOME barely existed, and 
have read hundreds (perhaps thousands) of GTK bugs, from all kinds of 
developers doing all kinds of things.

I have had as much part as anyone in *choosing* the "job description" of 
GTK+ 2.x; though many people have been and are involved. And I've 
probably *answered* more mail and bugs from people using it for 
non-GNOME scenarios than you have even *read*.

To avoid digging into your mail in detail, I'll just summarize:

First, a soft runtime dependency can do different things (sometimes 
amounting to ENOSYS) on platforms (perhaps NDesk) where a particular 
action does not make sense. If NDesk is enough different from the 
GNOME/KDE/XFCE setup, then GTK+ would have to treat it like Windows or 
another platform, perhaps not using dbus there, rather than treating all 
X11 scenarios the same. However, when porting GTK to the GNOME/KDE/XFCE 
type of platform, the way you do certain things is dbus. That is the 
platform API, in the same way that X11 is.

Second, as I said before, it is wrong to think of GTK as a UI toolkit 
only. The goal for many years has been to incorporate a more complete 
application framework. That's the premise of "Project Ridley" and the 
idea of nuking libgnome and libgnomeui. You may wish this were not the 
plan, but it has been the apparent consensus for some time, and it is 
hardly unprecedented (for example 
http://doc.trolltech.com/qtopia4.2/qt4-2-intro.html#desktop-integration 
from a quick google search). If you want to defend the libgnome* setup, 
feel free, but it really is not a dbus-specific discussion, and there's 
plenty of debate in the archives going back years if you're interested.

Havoc