[Sugar-devel] Hippo removal update

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

Raul and myself spent most of last weekend's Sugarcamp Paris working
on removing hippocanvas from Sugar, with some help from Simon too.
This was based on earlier work by Raul and Walter.

To just give a quick update, we made a lot of progress. Many things
that had been hacked or disabled in the initial efforts were restored
with clean code. We got down to just a handful of closing tasks.

Unfortunately it wasn't possible/sensible to divide up the remaining
work into individual patches, so we did finish the weekend without
posting a single patch :(
The main item at hand is that CanvasIcon (with its related classes
like CanvasInvoker) needs to be converted from a hippo widget to a
GTK+ widget. When you do that, lots of sugar breaks (all the views and
more), and needs to then be fully restored in the same patch, by
converting all the views to custom   gtk.Containers and so on.
Everything is so interlinked it wouldn't make sense to do quite a bit
of extra work to look at doing it more incrementally.

This is nearly done, but there are a few niggles left to solve.

Our work is here:
http://git.sugarlabs.org/~erikos/sugar/no-hippo
http://git.sugarlabs.org/~erikos/sugar-toolkit/toolkit-no-hippo

We will be continuing on Sunday, others are encouraged to join, see
you in #sugar !

Daniel