Re: [E-devel] About ewl.

[Nathan I. <ningerso@d.umn.edu>]

On Wed Nov 07, 2001 at 12:08:45PM +0100, Christian Kreibich is quoted as saying:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> this one is going out to the ewl developers. I've loosely followed the
> commits so far, and there's one thing I don't understand -- it seems
> you're making a lot of effort to do things the same way as gtk. However,
> you rewrite everything as a new lib. Why don't you try to make things
> gtk compatible, i.e. for now provide subsets of the gtk api that would
> be enough to make simple gtk apps compile when using ewl?

Actually, we haven't made that much effort to do things like gtk, in fact that's
only half intentional. We wanted to make an API that was similar enough to an
existing one that people could pick it up easily, but we wanted freedom to
change the API in ways we thought would be easier to use/understand. The main
similarities to gtk have developed because it was a common widget library that
smugg and I were both familiar with before starting ewl.

> I admire the energy you put into this, I just don't think the world
> needs yet another widget set api.
> 
> Regards,
> -- Christian.
> ________________________________________________________________________
>                                                     http://www.whoop.org

Well, I personally don't see the harm in another widget set api, especially
one that is well documented (which we're not yet, but it's coming along). If
the api uses similar concepts to existing api's it shouldn't be difficult to
pick up.

I guess that I prefer having a level of freedom in developing the api for ewl,
but smugg and I have discussed adding some compatibility wrappers to a subset
of the gtk api. There are some details/issues that need to be worked out first.
There is a pretty close correlation between gtk calls and ewl calls so porting
apps should be fairly simple, but the wrapper would ease the process.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   Nathan Ingersoll             |   Computer Science/Mathematics         |
|   mailto: ningerso@d.umn.edu   |   University of Minnesota-Duluth       |
|   http://umn.edu/~ningerso     |   http://www.d.umn.edu                 |
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