Port to GTK+ and GNOME

[Fernando Nasser <fnasser@redhat.com>]

Dear Insight developers and friends,

With the increasing acceptance of GTK+ and GNOME in many *ix systems, 
Insight may have to follow the pack and become more consistent with the 
GNOME look-and-feel and somehow migrate to use GTK+ in some form.

There are currently 3 different possible approaches:

1) Use gnocl (loosely modeled after TK)
2) Use tcl-gtk (just wraps GTK, or any other GObject based library)
3) add a GTK+ port to TK itself

All of these approaches have their merits and there are trade-offs among 
them.  I wonder if some of you haven't given any thoughts already to 
this and perhaps, have used any of these packages mentioned in 1 and 2, 
know the developers, what the prospects are etc. (these projects are 
still to release -- all they have are betas at the moment).

A GTK port of TK (as we currently have the Win32 and "Unix" variants) 
would make automatically all Tcl/Tk programs to use GTK (and some GNOME 
widgets like the file chooser).  But I wonder how much of the 
look-and-feel of GNOME would we get, as it would be still Tk on top 
(probably more of the look than the feel).

There is also the problem of implementation --  there is no clear API 
interface between these Tk layers. The process was not documented either 
(done by Sun, ages ago).  The magic seems to be done by changing the Tk 
callbacks to some windows or unix specific functions in the windows or 
unix subdirectories (only one of the two is configured) but there is 
little common ground between what was done for one and the other.  It 
will probably require a very good TK internals knowledge.


Things that we must discuss, besides the maintainability issues related 
to using one of the packages 1 and 2, are the effort required to 
complete the task.  We don't have many developer hours to do this as we 
all seem to be very busy with our other affairs.

We will probably want to coordinate with other Tcl?Tk open source 
projects (like Source Navigator, Red Hat Database Administrator etc.) so 
that we do not waste efforts going in opposite directions.


Please take some time to think about this and speak your minds.  The 
future of Insight may depend on this.


Regards to all,
Fernando



-- 
Fernando Nasser
Red Hat Canada Ltd.                     E-Mail:  fnasser@redhat.com
2323 Yonge Street, Suite #300
Toronto, Ontario   M4P 2C9