On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Federico Mena Quintero <federico@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > This should really use a CORBA interface and register some sort of > singleton factory object for images or other GIMP services. > > (Look at how singleton applications work in GNOME; the Midnight > Commander or the Panel are good examples). YES! This is the right thing to do. But not for 1.2, unfortunately. In the past, I was reluctant to any dependencies on GNOME, because I did not really understand what the CORBA stuff in the gnome-libs was supposed to do. Like many other people, I feared that GNOME would creep on my system and slowly take over my desktop or some of my applications. Well, over the last year I discovered that it was not the case and that it was possible to install some GNOME libraries wihtout installing all the things that I did not need (limited bloat). I also checked that GNOME would co-exist peacefully with all the other things that I had on my machine. So I do not object to (and I would even encourage) the introduction of some bits of GNOME in the GIMP, because some libraries (libart, the new HTML widget, and all the component stuff) would be very useful and would avoid the duplication of efforts. For example, using CORBA to allow the GIMP to run only in a single instance would be nice. Also, it would be very useful to re-write the GIMP plug-in interface to use the GNOME component model, especially for the file plug-ins. I already mentioned during GUADEC that the GIMP file plug-ins could be used in Nautilus (or other applications) for generating thumbnails and previews. Many exotic file formats are supported by the GIMP and the plug-ins could be re-used in other applications. But this will not happen before 1.2, because it would require significant changes in the code. So let's keep this in mind for the next major release... Oh, by the way, I think that the "single instance" feature should be an option. Sometimes I really want to have two copies of the GIMP running side-by-side on the same machine (but not often, so the default should probably be to have only a single instance). -Raphael
