[maemo-developers] [Hildon-Extras] New widgets: about dialog, simple color dialog

[From: Cornelius Hald]

Hi,

I've never tried to link anything statically, so I have really no
experiences to share here. Anyways, since no one objected, it's probably
not a bad idea :)

Before doing the release, maybe we should try to collect a list of
project currently using widgets from hildon-extras. We could then
directly contact the authors to notify them of the change.

Also we should think about further additions, that should go into the
first release. For example, I would really like to have a nice
HeColorButton, that contains a colored square and a label. The
integration of HeColorDialog and HeSimpleColorDialog would also be nice.

I could go for the color button. Would there be someone interested in
bringing together the color dialogs?

Generally I think the widgets in hildon-extras are already a great
addition to the standard hildon widgets and I think we really should
release them soon(-ish) :)

Cheers!
Conny


On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 16:42 +0100, Thomas Perl wrote:
> I think it would be helpful to create/ship a library. If we don't want
> to create a shared library just yet, we can always create a static
> library + some "compatibility level" C macros to issue compiler errors
> when the API changes (HE_ASSUME_API_LEVEL(1)?) against which packages
> link against (and depend on the -dev package). Any API changes could
> then be documented on the webpage or the wiki, with help and code
> examples on how to "upgrade" to a newer API version to make it easier
> for developers to upgrade to a new hildon-extras API version. Of
> course, this means that application packages that are not updated
> might not build from source in the future (source packages can be
> easily changed to the new API version; due to the static library,
> binary packages will not break).
> 
> Even a static library seems to be a better solution than copy'n'paste.
> I believe that if users of hildon-extras (developers using HE in their
> projects) start to copy'n'paste stuff, they might add new features and
> fixes only in their local version, making it a nightmare for the HE
> maintainers to go and "collect" all fixes from different projects and
> merge them into the hildon-extras repository (it's also tedious
> merging changes from HE to the local copy). A compiler error pointing
> to a Wiki page that describes how to upgrade to a newer API version
> seems much more developer-friendly and allows us to improve things
> without requiring to commit to a fixed API too early.
> 
> After some months when the bugs and API annoyance are ironed out, we
> can create a shared library and provide API/ABI compatibility.
> 
> Please point out any thought errors that I might have had here ;)
> 
> Thomas