From my Own True Love (Lost at Sea)

Third day of the GTK hackfest. They have taken the bridge and the second hall. We have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes, drums… drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. We can not get out… they are coming.

today, the topics discussed were two:

• Clutter — Benjamin, Matthias, and I discussed how to integrate Clutter with GTK in the future. the plan that is shaping up is to hollow out GtkWidget and make it the minimal semantic unit of the structure of an application; a button, a combo box, a text entry, etc. each widget would then be composed of internal elements — the background and the text for a button; the icons, the progress bar, and the text, for an entry, and so on, and so forth. each element maps the CSS box model (as far as it makes sense), and it’s backed by a ClutterActor. layout management of each element, and rendering, is deferred to Clutter. so, each GtkWidget has-a ClutterActor, that you can also access to use Clutter directly. implementing a GtkWidget would then be simplified to actually building the structure that has to be rendered, drawing with Cairo on provided surfaces if you have custom content instead of primitives like texture data or text, thus leaving the rest to the scene graph underneath. while this is not a radical change in how GTK+ works, we’re definitely considering bumping to the 4.0 API version — this time it wouldn’t be such a quantum leap like it has been for the 2.x to 3.x transition. all this work depends on the Clutter 2.0 effort, which will take the bulk of the next cycle for me. hopefully, with a little help, we’ll be able to do a GTK+ 4.0 in 12 months.
• design — after lunch, we all sat down with the GNOME designers, and talked about the direction for the toolkit, especially with regards to enabling touch on widgets, and adding more widgets that are touch-oriented to be used when designing applications for touchscreen environments. we also discussed a lot about themeing, and how app developers should use or depend on themes like they do on ABI. then we went through the design whiteboards section of the wiki to see what tasks involve the toolkit — like printing, notification, selection, and content selection.

all in all, it was a very productive day; we’re churning through the agenda points at a fairly good pace, and hopefully we’ll soon be able to work on all the areas that have been identified, in order to make GNOME rock.