Abort, Retry, Fail?

So let’s try this blogging thing again — now from an all new location (I am at blogs.gnome.org now) and a brand-new hackergotchi courtesy of Andreas. WordPress Mu supports importing old LiveJournals these days, which also worked fine for me, except for all new lines to have disappeared. But who is interested in old news anyway?

This blog post is really long overdue. Over the summer I slowly started to hack on a full rewrite of GtkTreeView’s drag and drop implementation and related exported API. People familair with the matter know about the numerous problems. Unfamiliar people probably still know about #70479: “DnD with multiple selected items won’t work”. Yes, this bug has been open since 2002 and it feels really great to be finally getting somewhere. I think I’ve got the new API basically nailed (it really works beautifully and I am personally quite fond of it) and I am currently trying to get support for the old API back in place in some kind of compatible fashion. As I also rewrote all of the internal drag and drop signal handling in GtkTreeView, I really threw out everything and started from scratch. For me this also means I now have a fairly good knowledge of how drag and drop actually works ;) I got a huge amount of inspiration out of a reply from Federico on my earlier attempts to get multiple item DnD going.

Another thing that has been brewing originated at the GTK+ Hackfest earlier this year in Berlin. I sat down with both Johan Dahlin and Emmanuele Bassi to have a quick look at “simple list APIs” for GtkTreeView in python and perl (matching person and languange is left as an exercise for the reader ;). Here “simple list API” really means an easy to use wrapper around GtkTreeView (and its companion objects). From the API found in both language bindings, I devised a nice, simple and easy to use C API. The implementation for this is also already there.

Both of these projects are really getting somewhere so expect detailed API proposals and review on gtk-devel-list in 1.5 month or so. I don’t know yet what to tackle next, I really want to finish off these two first. However, my to do and idea list is infinite, so finding something else shouldn’t be hard.

In other news, the end of my time at a University is finally in sight. I really hope to have received my Master’s degree well before the start of Summer 2009. I am really enjoying the classes I am taking this semester, but still it will be great when I have finally finished my degrees. Having the end (finally) in sight here also gives me a lot more inspiration, hence the GTK+ stuff I am getting done these days. And I also reached the age of 24 years 1.5 weeks ago … I am really getting old now :/ ;)