X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mail set sender to geda-user-bounces using -f X-Recipient: geda-user AT delorie DOT com X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com From: Kai-Martin Knaak Subject: Re: [geda-user] Docking Property Editors Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2015 20:35:49 +0200 Lines: 63 Message-ID: References: <6384EC21-FBC6-47D2-A371-CB9770C27561 AT sbcglobal DOT net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit X-Complaints-To: usenet AT ger DOT gmane DOT org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: a89-182-126-155.net-htp.de User-Agent: KNode/4.14.1 Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com Edward Hennessy (ehennes AT sbcglobal DOT net) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote: > >> On Jul 24, 2015, at 10:19 AM, Kai-Martin Knaak >> wrote: >> >> What infrastructure does inkscape use for its docked dialogues? >> Inkscape is a gtk application which runs fine in windows and apple >> since ages. And it is pretty popular too. > > The Inkscape configure.ac shows GDL, interestingly, the current debian package of inkscape does not seem to depend on libgdl: $ apt-rdepends inkscape | grep libgd Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Depends: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0) libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 Depends: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common (= 2.31.1-2) libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common Depends: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0) Depends: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0) Depends: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0) $ > It also shows a private fork of GDL that is deprecated. This may be the reason for no "official" dependence in the apt data base Again using apt-rdepend I find that only very few packages seem to use this library. Actually, there are only two applications in the current debian repository which use it: gtranslator and anjuta. In other words, this lib is hardly used at all. To be fair, anjuta is a decent project which will most probably not go a way any time soon. But it might decide to switch to a different UI paradigm and leave libgdl by the wayside. There is no windows version of anjuta or gtranslator. So there is probably no much incentive to make sure, a cross compile of this library works out of the box. We have already seen how such a constellation might hurt a windows port in the case of guile. Anyway, I installed anjuta to get a feel for how libgdl works. It does does a decent job. I was indeed reminded of the docks in inkscape. From a user perspective, the inkscape dock are not that great though. I remember fighting the UI more than once. It just would not allow me to move the parts to where I wanted. In the end I just gave in and let the docks stay wherever they happened be by default. There may be a lesson to be learned: Perhaps the ability to rescale and reposition individual docks on the fly does not contribute that much to usability. A well chosen default to an offline configurable window layout can do the job just fine. (The "job" in this case is to get rid of all the overlapping pop-ups) A semi fixed layout would not depend on a library or a heroic programming effort with all its strings and side effects. ---<)kaimartin(>---