The Upcoming Changes of the Gnome Subsystem (GnomeDesktop) [LWN.net]

GnomeDesktop reports that Anders Carlsson of Imendio outlines and explains the API changes that are coming with the Gnome 3.0 release in the future. "One of the most horrible parts of libgnome is GnomeProgram; the code that handles start-up and argument parsing for GNOME programs. This code also sets up the program to be more "integrated" with the rest of GNOME. For example, when your application segfaults you get this nice dialog allowing you to report a bug. When you have accessibility enabled, GnomeProgram calls the necessary hooks for that. All that is done by GnomeProgram."

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The Upcoming Changes of the Gnome Subsystem (GnomeDesktop)

Posted Nov 16, 2004 21:38 UTC (Tue) by newren (subscriber, #5160) [Link]

As with the gnomedesktop article (which this LWN article is merely quoting), this is really misleading in that it implies that Gnome 3.0 is being planned right now as well as what goes in with it; I think it was a horrible summary of what Anders said in his blog. Anders pointed out some problematic API in Gnome and listed what was being provided to be used in its place. Due to backward compatibility requirements the crufty stuff can't be removed at this time--instead it is just marked as deprecated. He pointed this all out by stating, in response to "When can we remove all these crufty APIs?", that "This can't happen before the next binary incompatible release of GNOME, which should be 3.0 or so. As no one knows what GNOME 3.0 will contain or when it will be out, the answer to that question is hard to give."