From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 29846 invoked by alias); 3 Dec 2002 20:17:34 -0000 Mailing-List: contact insight-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: insight-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 29834 invoked from network); 3 Dec 2002 20:17:30 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO touchme.toronto.redhat.com) (216.138.202.10) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 3 Dec 2002 20:17:30 -0000 Received: from redhat.com (tooth.toronto.redhat.com [172.16.14.29]) by touchme.toronto.redhat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1725780010D; Tue, 3 Dec 2002 15:17:26 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3DED13C9.9070506@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:17:00 -0000 From: Fernando Nasser Organization: Red Hat Canada User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020607 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "'insight@sources.redhat.com'" , Jim Ingham Subject: Port to GTK+ and GNOME Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-q4/txt/msg00145.txt.bz2 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