From: Sven Neumann <neumanns@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2000 01:32:38 +0100
You don't seem to be very familiar with gnome-libs, especially not with the
progress that was/is being made towards the next release. Without going into
details, I see lots of good stuff we could use, like
gnome-print for printing (preview, native printer drivers, a nice print
dialog)
Ugh. Native print drivers don't belong in there (and before anyone
points out that they don't belong in the Gimp, you're right, which is
why a major part of our road map is to remove them and put them into
Ghostscript or CUPS or pdq or whatever the low level printing standard
winds up becoming).
gnome-font for font-rendering (don't know if gnome-2.0 will have this)
gnome-canvas for the UI (he draw routines we use on the gimp canvas are
very difficult to handle, using objects that can be connexted
to
and emit signals would make our live much easier)
libart provides convenient and optimized functions for all sorts of
affine transformations
gdk-pixbuf image-loading and simple (but fast) transformations (we may
want
to use this to implement a proper brush and patterns system
since
it integrates nicely with libart which would give us scalable,
rotatable brushes/patterns for free)
gconf for configuration (have a look into the code for the
preferences-dialog, it sucks badly ...)
gtkhtml seems to be a very nice replacement for gtkxmhtml
...
On the other hand, a lot depends on the GNOME people. I hope that
their goal is to provide a bloat-free set of portable libraries
that don't depend on too much other stuff we don't want to use.
I'd argue that except for gconf and MAYBE gnome-canvas none of this
stuff belongs in GNOME at all; these are all very generic facilities
that shouldn't depend on any of the IPC, desktop, etc. stuff.
Otherwise we wind up with the same kind of confusion and versioning
problems that Windows has suffered with for so long.
--
Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/
Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Project lead for The Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
