[maemo-developers] GtkAction vs. AppMenu

[From: Alberto Garcia]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 10:09:49PM +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:

> if radio buttons are meant to look a certain way in Maemo, why isn't
> that just a matter of theming or even of making a change in the GTK+
> code instead of asking people to use the GTK+ API in an abnormal
> way?

Well, there are several reasons for that:

   * First, I don't think there's anything abnormal about that
     API. gtk_toggle_button_set_mode() is there exactly for that
     purpose and it's trivial to use. I don't think it's necessary to
     patch GTK when GTK is already designed to do what we want here.

   * Second, maemo-gtk already differs from the upstream version of
     GTK in quite a few things. Using a fork of GTK is not something
     desirable in general, and keeping it in sync with upstream is not
     a trivial task either, as the maemo-gtk maintainers (Lanedo) will
     probably tell you if you ask them. So we try to introduce as few
     changes as possible to maemo-gtk unless they're really
     necessary. We don't think it's the case here, for the reason
     explained above.

   * Third, GTK is a general purpose toolkit, and contains lots of
     very different widgets for all kinds of needs, but that doesn't
     need that they're all equally suited to every kind of platform or
     device.

     We can decide how we want Maemo to be and how we want its
     applications look like. GTK is good enough to allow us to create
     the widgets that we need, and that's why GTK was chosen. But that
     doesn't mean that we have to remove all the widgets and functions
     that we don't need/recommend for Fremantle. We cannot stop people
     from doing things that we think don't fit in the Fremantle UI
     style.

Berto