Re: [Mlview-hacking] Initial patch for Gnome 2 support

[Dave Malcolm]

On Thursday 01 August 2002 03:37, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>
> Waow !! You got into the task very quickly man !! Congrats and
> thank you.

Advantages of not having a job at the moment :-)

>
> I suspect a lot of dev on the gnome2 port front. I new view is
> definetely usefull. It would be great if I could turn the views into
> pluggins so that we could build gnome1 and gnome2 pluggins. That way,
> we could continue adding features in gnome1 and in gnome2 . We could
> also leverage on the features common to gnome1 and gnome2.
> What do you think about that ?

I don't think that plugins are a good way to go at the moment.  

Assuming that all views are subclasses of MlViewXMLDocumentView then there's 
already a fairly clean architecture, and it ought to be fairly simple to go 
over to a plugin architecture at a later date. But by doing so now the 
project gets that much more complicated, and the interfaces get "set in 
stone".  So I think we should avoid plugins for now.  Also much of the need 
for plugins is removed by Bonobo - which solves the problems in a much more 
generic way than a single project's plugin system is likely to achieve.

I believe that all of the stuff in the view I'm going to implement will 
compile and work under both Gnome 1 and Gnome 2.

>
> For the time being, you can maintain a gnome2 port source tree of
> mlview. I can add this new tree on savannah. Just tell me. Do you think
> you will have the time to do deal with that task ?

Possibly - I've been reading about CVS but I'm not very experienced at 
actually using it.   I've used SourceSafe extensively (including its more 
advanced features) and NxN's AlienBrain system, though they both have rather 
different underlying concepts to CVS.

I'm rather worried about how we'd keep the two trees "in sync".   I don't 
think there's a great deal that needs to be different between them, and as 
patches come in they'd mostly need to be applied to both.   Is there a way of 
automatically merging changes between two versions of the codebase in CVS?  
(the "branches" feature, perhaps)

How do you see this working?  I can't really answer your question without 
knowing how this would work.

>
> On the documentation front, i have a lot to tell you about the
> document/view design of mlview. I have started an architecture design
> but that task is a bit stalled for the moment :(

I've read through the architecture notes on the website and through the 
generated source documentation.   They're pretty good already.

> We can meet on irc.gnome.org #gnome-mlview . Just tell me when you are
> available (Paris time) and we will discuss.

I've not used IRC as my internet connection is expensive. I'm in Oxford, 
England, so we're almost in the same time zone, I believe (you're in Paris?). 
Evenings and weekends are much cheaper for me.   Suggest a time/date, and get 
me to confirm.

>
> I think the best thing i should do now, is to stop programming a bit
> and write the architecture documentation. no ?

I don't think so... what's there on the site seems enough to be getting on 
with.  I was merely worried in my email about how rigid the model/view 
separation is, and the best way of finding that out is probably to go ahead 
and write a new view class.  So that's what I plan to do, and we'll see 
what "comes out in the wash".

>
> Thank you.
>
> Dodji.
>

<snip>

Thanks for getting back to me
Dave