From: Andrew S. <an...@al...> - 2006-09-18 14:42:56
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> > He looked over some of the earlier patches. One of his comments was that > > many of the calls were still to GTK1 style APIs which are deprecated in > > GTK2. Don't know how long GTK2 will support the GTK1 APIs. He also > > commented that GTK2 has a different style of handling loops and events (I > > think those are the right terms. I'm barely a GTK novice.), so the > > conversion from GTK1 to GTK2 is more that just replacing GTK1 APIs with > > GTK2 APIs. You would know more about this than I. Well thanks for the vote of confidence, but at this point I have to own up to also being a GTK novice. So I'll welcome input from more experienced GTK coders. In GTK2 I've built just a few sample projects, but I believe I've got the flavor. In Windows I've built quite a few GUIs using the bare-metal API, and GTK seems to me to be very similar to that. They're both based on messages (Windows)/signals (GTK), and the most common widgets are basically the same. Being new to GTK, at least I won't be trapped in any GTK1 thinking. > If I could've rewritten the GUI now, I would have separated out more of > the business logic dealing with how tasks are accomplished (such as > create a region or resizing a storage object) from the presentation view > thus hopefully allowing easier ports to another widget library and using > more common code. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that. Good point. I'll keep it in mind. > IMHO, a full implementation of a GTK2 GUI for evms would be the best > avenue and hopefully avoid the hybrid version which looks better but > still relies on some "old technology". Of course it would be a challenge > but yield more long-term benefits. After thinking it over for a while, I'm inclined to agree. Best to start fresh, especially as I'm learning GTK2, rather than cloud things up with the old GTK1 logic. Of course the old code would be a key reference. Also, for the moment I'm not contemplating any redesign of the GUI. I'm not an interface designer, just a programmer. My first goal is just to replicate the existing GUI in GTK2. Naturally I'll try to make it as easy as possible to extend the GUI later, e.g. by adding a new tab for the entity graphs, or by adding some druids for common tasks, as you suggest. > And the code would eventually make > it's way into the evms tree I would hope. That's absolutely my goal. No fork here. > What would be really exciting for the project would be to develop a new > UI approach to the same tasks. For example, adding a wizard for novice > users to deal with simple or common tasks to short cut the generic > dialogs such as "partition a new disk" in addition to the the more > generic capabilities. This sounds good, but as I said above, I may not be the best person to design it. More soon. Andrew. |