[maemo-developers] Community widgets for Fremantle

[From: Cornelius Hald]

Hi!

On Fri, 2009-09-25 at 00:16 +0300, Claudio Saavedra wrote:
> Until you give it a try, it's only speculations. That's why I suggest
> that we work together on moving things forward.

I totally agree that we should work together! Lets just give it a quick
try to see whether or not we're talking about the same things.

As an example we can just use my copy&past ConboyCheckButton which is a
check button with two labels. Would you consider it as an addition to
Hildon? Here is a screenshot + the code:

http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/check_button.png
https://garage.maemo.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/trunk/conboy/src/conboy_check_button.c?revision=340&root=conboy&view=markup
https://garage.maemo.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/trunk/conboy/src/conboy_check_button.h?revision=340&root=conboy&view=markup

> Experience shows that having a separate toolkit library causes more
> damage in terms of maintainability than the advantages it might bring.
> Just take the case of the GNOME project, for instance. At some point
> GNOME suffered from a huge fragmentation of libraries, by the time when
> libgnome and libgnomeui were becoming the place for widgets and code
> that, for whatever reason, were not suitable for glib/GTK+. Later, other
> libraries came: libsexy, libegg, etc. The spirit was similar.
> 
> But unfortunately, the result was that, on spite of being widely used,
> these libraries ended up being mostly unmaintained, while glib and GTK+
> slowly gained the missing features these provided. The effort to get rid
> of the dependencies on the unmaintained libraries has been enormous and
> after several development cycles, the GNOME community still can't fully
> deprecate them/remove them.

You're right of course, I also see this problem. Still the question
remains was happens to code that is not suitable for Hildon?

> Well, I would personally prefer to see more people involved in hildon
> instead of working on their own, specially now that there's clearly a
> gap to be filled between the toolkit set that Diablo (or even plain GTK
> +) has and what's part of Maemo 5 one. The only reason why these widgets
> don't exist is because no one has come up with a proposal and/or initial
> implementations on which to base on. Now that there's common interest, I
> think it's a good moment to let the work happen.

It probably a good idea to build a strong Hildon community especially
when looking at Harmattan. There will be many of us depending on good
Gtk/Hildon support.

> If anyone is interested in going through a more detailed discussion of
> what is missing in the toolkit nowadays, we'd be pleased to discuss it
> in the hildon-devel at garage.maemo.org mailing list. Also, remember that
> Berto and I will be hosting a BoF in the future of Hildon/GTK+ during
> the Maemo Summit, so the instances to discuss in detail and start
> working together are just right there.

I would suggest to leave the discussion here a bit longer to make sure
that we get as many people involved as possible. Than once things get
started we can move.

One question come to my mind: How 'free' is the Hildon project? Of
course the code is open, but are you free to just release a new version
in, for example, half a year? Are you free in deciding how the widgets
should look and behave? Can you ship widgets that Nokia does not like?
Or do you have to discuss stuff like this for with Nokia first?

Cheers!
Conny