[Geany-Devel] RFC: Policy for Glade File Updates

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 12.09.2013 02:38, schrieb Matthew Brush:
> Hi,

I (as a unregular contributor) would love to be able to use glade.

To sum the problem up:
  - As long as we're still on GTK+ 2.x we won't be able to use upstream 
Glade (Geany on GTK+3 is fine, btw, thanks for that work).
  - Worse, only a few older versions work.
  - And even more worse, you can't practically interchange glade 
versions because the generated .xml tends to be ordered differently (I, 
myself, don't care about that but I understand it makes viewing commit 
diffs harder).
  - And the worst, you need to hand-edit the .xml to fix up the 
icon-names stuff.

Is this summary correct or did I miss anything?

The following could solve/workaround our situation:

1) Find the version which works best (stable .xml generation)
2) Fork this and integrate it into the Geany tree. Since we don't follow 
upstream I expect it won't be a mantainance problem.
3) Fix the icon-names thing (assuming one of us is capable to do so)
4) Declare that only our glade copy can be used to change the UI. Also 
declare that this is strictly for use with Geany and we don't accept bug 
reports if people use it for other things.
5) Only change the code in our glade copy if we find it struggles with 
Geany's UI (we don't need to care about other projects) or to make it 
build on newer distros.

Basically I'm suggesting that we set a glade version in stone which is 
capable of handling our UI generation and make it mandatory for all 
contributors. By integrating into the Geany tree it's easy to find and 
we can make sure it keeps working.

Is there a problem with this approach?

Best regards.