Project Ridley

Goals

Project Ridley is an effort to consolidate a number of external libraries into GTK+.

These libraries are generally small, undermaintained, and buggy. They have an unclear mission (such as libgnome and libgnomeui) or would benefit by being in GTK+ (such as libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui.)

We would be working towards releasing GTK+-3.0 as a result of this work.

Target Libraries

• libgnome (2/7)
• libgnomeui (2/7)

• libgnomeprint22 (2/2)

• libgnomeprintui22 (2/2)

• libglade (1/1)

• libgnomecanvas (0/1)
• libegg (4/9)
• libeel (0/1)
• gtkglext (0/1)

API/ABI Clarification

There has been some confusion about the ramifications on GTK+'s API/ABI. There is no plan to break API/ABI as a result of this change. We plan to add API to GTK+ (as has happened during the course of the 2.x series) but we don't plan on removing deprecated widgets.

Criteria

As Owen said in a recent GTK+ meeting, when looking over the list of APIs that we are discussing here, there are basically three categories:

1. Cross-platform API - things that make sense on Windows / OS X
2. X / freedesktop.org-specific API
3. GNOME-specific API

APIs in category A. are clearly suitable for moving to GTK+, APIs in category B. may or may not be suitable, and things in category C. are better off in a GNOME-specific library. An examples for B. would be a session management API that closely follows XSMP, an example for C would be gnome-vfs. Also note that in some cases an API may in principle be cross-platform, even if the current implementation makes heavy use of platform-specific libraries.

libgnome and libgnomeui

There's a comprehensive treatment of these libraries at LibgnomeMustDie

libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui

libglade

We've wanted to move libglade into GTK+ for some time.

libgnomecanvas

There is interest in having a more sophisticated Canvas widget inside GTK+. The current GnomeCanvas codebase is deficient for a number of reasons.

libegg

We don't want to kill off the library, but some widgets have such widespread use that we should move them into GTK+. There's a list of current libegg usage in GNOME CVS here.

libeel

libeel is only used by nautilus and many of the glib extensions in eel are in glib already. There is one piece of eel remaining requested for GTK+.

gtkglext