future plans

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Mo" == Mo DeJong <mdejong@cygnus.com> writes:

Mo> What features from Gtk or Gnome do you see as a "must have".
Mo> The ability to do themes might be neat, but I don't see it
Mo> as a critical component of a good IDE. Gnome has some
Mo> configuration management stuff that might be handy if we
Mo> needed it, but I don't think we do.

Themes are nice, but they are just candy.  Most people would rather
have a tool that works well than one that conforms to their
environment.  (Well, most people would prefer both, I'd imagine...)

The config code is nice, and will get much nicer (with GConf), but
unless you want network transparency and the use of weird back ends it
isn't very important.

There are two more important things that Gnome has that S-N currently
can't do:

* Drag and drop
* Session management

Both of these can be written as Tcl extensions though.

The D&D protocol is (I believe) well-documented and in use by a few
groups (both Gnome and KDE at least).  (I know you've argued against
D&D before, but I've never understood your argument.)

Gnome's session management is just XSMP.  There is an (ugly) X library
to help you do this; Gnome just wraps it with a nicer API.  (At some
point session management and configuration storage might tie together
somehow.  That would be harder to emulate.)

Gnome also has some other things, like the ability to play sounds in
response to certain events (activate a button widget, get a beep).
This is along the lines of themability though -- not deeply important.


The really important Gnome stuff comes later: componentization of
everything.  Maybe it will be possible to use this from Tcl, too, with
some work.  I don't know.

Maybe components aren't important for an IDE.  I think they could be
used though.  For instance the debugger gui could be plugged in to S-N
somehow.

Tom