As I said on the gnome-utils mailing list, the GNOME Dictionary codebase sucks.
Well, it sucks to the very end of it.
It really shows its age (it’s more than 5 years old), and suffers of what I’m used to call design by accretion. This particular technique of software design works like a black hole: particles are attracted to the singularity, and form the “accretion disk”, which is nothing but a big mass of… er… mass, graviting around, attracting other mass, and accelerating – thus getting hotter and hotter – until it eventually hits the event horizon. In software, it works the same way; new code is added, and it becomes relevant up to the point of becoming critical. The code becomes a little bit ugly, and it attracts other ugly code in order to make things work and to add new features. Time passes, and the codebase becomes a uglier mess at each iteration. At one point, everything simply collapses, because one of the “oh-so-hackish” portions of code simply passes the point of being understandable by any human being – including the original writer. Also, the overall entropy of the software increases, because no-one is smart enough to understand the code, let alone sanitize it; this is what I call the “design by accretion runaway syndrome”. At this point, the only option for a developer is to toss everything out of the window in disgust, and begin from scratch; which means time, effort, and skills needed for features and bug-fixing are instead spent on rewriting stuff. One way to stop a “design by accretion” before it reaches its “runaway syndrome” is to check for hacks, kludges, ugly portions of code and exterminate them at each iterations. Hacks are what they are: they might be clever, well-thought or a demostration of coding skills; but they are hacks nonetheless, and the shorter they live, the better codebase will result in the end.
The dictionary application and applet is the best result of this particular software design “technique”; not only the high-level code is a collection of circular references and inclusions – also the low-level implementation of the dictionary protocol has become hackish enough to include at least two API, one of which is an almost complete implementation of RFC 2229, while the other is like a remnant of a previous implementation.
I tried to put a thin GObject layer around it, in order to avoid having to write my own implementation of the dictionary protocol; so far, the results are discouraging. Ergo, the best solution is to throw away the low-level stuff, create a new, GObject-oriented implementation of the dictionary protocol, and build up from there.
In the meantime, I’ll have to pass a couple of exams, and begin porting the BookmarkFile and RecentManager/RecentChooser code under GLib and GTK; also, the FileChooser code should be adapted to support recently used files in OPEN mode, and the shortcuts be saved using the BookmarkFile object inside a default location – something like $XDG_DATA_HOME/desktop-bookmarks/gtk-shortcuts.xbel.