Re: [as-devel] 1.8 ?

Steven Baker (sbaker@debian.org)
Tue, 27 Jul 1999 15:19:09 -0400 

On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 05:46:07PM +0200, Albert Dorofeev wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 10:14:28AM -0500, David Mihm wrote:
> > 
> > 	The funny thing about that is, the (IMO) primary goal (aside
> > from the obvious push forward) for the 1.7.x devel tree was the
> > intergration of theming in some sort of module, and that has been a slow
> > ond oft debated ideology.  Hopefully a methodology can be arrived at,
> > whether it be xml or the other currently debated method.
> > 
> > 	I for one vote for the latter method over xml. Xml would make it
> > such a pain to manually manipulate the look/feel files.
> 
> Ok, I know nothing of xml at all so I won't argue this point.
> I would like to get some clarification on the issue though...
> 

... This is somewhat lengthy ...

  The advantages of using XML are clear.  It is fast becoming a
standard, the next HTML DTD will be XML based, and many programs are
already using XML.  Many Gnome programs (off the top of my head, the
Gnome productivity apps are using XML for their file formats) are
using XML already, and Gnome itself is going to be moving to an
XML-based configuration scheme soon.  Also, the next versions of RPM
and dpkg will be (compatibly) using XML for the metadata stored in
packages (yes, I know what I'm talking about--trust me).
  Using XML also relieves us from having to code configuration parsing
ourselves, there are some XML libraries already.  What was once
gnome-xml (which is soon going to be officially libxml) is supposedly
a great place to start for XML coding, though I havent' explored the
API yet.
  The obvious disadvantage to using XML are that it's a mess to write
by hand.  Of course, we _could_ write programs to either a) convert to
XML from the current format, or b) have graphical configuration.  I
can hear the more "elite" of the bunch groaning at the "graphical
configuration" point as I type.
  The other suggestion that I have is to use PropList.  Although my
experience with the proplist API is somewhat limited (I've read a few
READMEs here and there...) it does provide us with configuration that
is both GNUstep compatible, _and_ easy to edit by hand.  WindowMaker,
among many others, currently use PropList for configuration, and it
seems to me that it is quite good, judging from some feedback I have
seen.
  I would rather see us use an existing library, that is "tried,
tested and true" rather than write our own configuration parser, and
end up running into the same sort of problems that the people who
wrote the ones that already work did.

> Is the idea to have a module responsible for look/feel
> in 1.8? Like merging look and feel into one configuration
> file and having a special module for all the fancy things?
> 

One thing that I just thought of was that we could keep the look/feel
data seperate, and still together, and I have seen discussion on a
sort of this idea on the dpkg2/rpm4 list.  We can keep the look and
feel data seperate by putting it in totally different tags, and allow
the two to be in the same file, or in two different ones.  A file
might be outlined something like this:

<look>
 ... Data for appearance.
</look>
<feel>
 ... Data for feel.
</feel>

[snip]

  One thing about XML that really excites me is the built in support
for internationalization.  Although we could probably achieve the same
thing with gettext, here's what the data for, say the close button
might look like:

<button action=close icon="file.xpm">
 <tooltip lang=english text="Close this window.">
 <tooltip lang=frog text="Ribbit Ribbit.">
</button>

  Some feedback on the ideas outlined above would be nice,

-Steven