On 4/15/06, Karl Lattimer karl@qdh.org.uk wrote:
If this http://wiki.winehq.org/ThemingSupport is to become a part of wine (RE: GTK support for themes), I don't see what the problem with using GTK is. GTK is available on all distributions that I know of, and definitely all popular distributions. winetools already uses the legacy
Just because GTK support may be added for themes, doesn't mean that wine's tools should be GTK specific. The idea is that you write it using Win32 gui controls and then if the user's computer has GTK then it gets themed automatically. For this tool to have the best compatibility it shouldn't require gtk to be compiled in.
On the subject of dependencies, if the application is not required by the wine core then surely dependencies are irrelevant, and the shortest development path (python gtk, glade imho) should be considered as it means the application will be available much faster than developing it in C which could take far longer to develop.
Most development time can be cut by thinking the implementation through properly at the beginning. A good C programmer should be able to write a maintainable application in a similar amount of time to a good python programmer. (Note however, that being a good C programmer can be harder than being a good python programmer.)
I see many python developers get into the habit of writing short-term maintainable code and replacing it often long-term. I think this is just because developers get used to python being so simple to rewrite and saying, 'I can fix it later.' This is both a good thing and a bad thing.
If I say it _must_ be written in C win32, perl or bash then immediately developers will consider the issues, ok perl could do a lot of it easily but there are some problems in other areas, bash would be a large amount of work and win32 C would mean lots and lots of code auditing, re-factoring and bug fixing, probably resulting in a 5 year development process to get the application to a point where it is in regular use. These issues may serve to deter a developer from taking on the project with a view to "I'm not getting my hands on that train wreck".
That's just not true at all. While I see python programmers regularly regurgitate this whole 'C is unmaintainable and takes years to write' thing, have you considered what language python is written in? And is it a buggy train wreck? Those new modules you use after a python upgrade, did they take 5 years to write?
Everybody knows a badly made win32 C program is possibly the worst possible thing imaginable, but there are many examples where well written, maintainable and relatively bug-free applications were written quite quickly in C.
I don't have anything against python, and it is a great language to use, but that doesn't mean it's the best possible language to use for every conceivable project. Wine is supposed to be a way to run Win32 programs on UNIX, and not every unix flavour comes with GTK and python. I think people would say Wine has enough run-time dependencies, and there's no strong reason why another one can't be avoided here.
My two cents, n0dalus.