future plans

[Syd Polk]

>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.)

I don't remember arguing against the idea of drag-and-drop. It is a great 
feature which I would love to have.


>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.)

I don't know what "session management" means.

>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.

The problem is, of course, that this is a major rewrite of something. 
Either Tk has to be fitted with it, or we have to rewrite the entire GUI in 
GNOME. I would rather not spend several man-years doing the latter.


Syd Polk		spolk@redhat.com
Engineering Manager	+1 415 777 9810 x 241
Red Hat, Inc.