[sugar] Re: Canvas considerations for Sugar/OLPC

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 23:07 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> What ever happened to Alex's infamous GTK offscreen patch?  We're still
> stuck in the same world where a canvas is a one-way viewport that has to
> do it's own event handling.  We won't be able to use GTK widgets in any
> of the Home UI we're looking to build, simply because it would make use
> of the canvas and we can't embed GTK widgets in a canvas AFAIK.

Its currently a patch here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318807

The code sort of works, but its not really in a generally usable state.
It requires lots of testing and fixing. Also, the approach has
limitations, as several things require a real xwindow id: opengl,
Xvideo, Xinput extension, etc.

Of course, if you don't need correct stacking and translation/rotation
of subwindows you could just put an X window over the canvas.

> - Who knows the maintainers of either of these two options?  Are they
> both sharp people?

GooCanvas is written by Damon Chaplin. He's a sharp guy, and a longtime
gnome developer (he wrote glade i think). 
Herzi, the libccc developer has been around the community a while, but I
don't really know anything about him.

> - Has anyone looked at the code of these two options besides us?  What
> are your thoughts and concerns?

I've looked at GooCanvas a bit. The API and code looks pretty good for
what it is. Its pretty similar in API to the traditional GnomeCanvas
API, which is nice if you know that I guess, but it might be possible to
create a better API if you spend some time on it.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an underprivileged devious cat burglar gone bad. She's a man-hating gypsy 
doctor who believes she is the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian queen. 
They fight crime!