Hi Adam,

On 15 March 2011 01:42, Adam Goode <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Just wanted to see what the status is with the bundled version of gtkextra
> in nip2. I assume nothing is changed since the last time I checked, that
> nip2 still has a copy of this code internally?
>
> Just wondering, since there is an open Fedora bug about this:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=622001

Yes, there have been some changes.

First, nip2 now uses goffice to plot graphs, rather than the gtkplot
widget from gtkextra. I've removed all the gtkextra plotting code (50k
lines!). goffice is fast, high-quality and well-maintained, so this is
a great improvement.

This leaves just the gtksheet and gtkitementry widgets (two files of
source). They don't work well, I've had to chop them about a bit to
work as well as they do, but they are still better for displaying
matrices than the standard gtk treeview widget.

I see a few ways forward on this:

1) Use the standard treeview widget

There's code in nip2 to do this, though it's only used if you have a
very old gtk. I've added a configure switch to master to let you
compile without gtksheet.

It's not that great though, sadly. There's no rectangular selection,
and you can't have row labels, only column labels. There has been some
discussion of improving treeview for this use-case on the gtk mailing
list, but little enthusiasm for doing the work, unfortunately.

2) Push nip2's changes into gtkextra

I fixed some bugs (I think gtkextra has these fixes already), I did
some renaming to fix clashes with gtk, and I changed the way the thing
does layout. I don't think they will want the layout changes, but
perhaps it's worth asking. Though I'm not sure who to offer the
changes too :-(

A while ago another dev seemed to be interested in doing a new
gtksheet with some of these fixes, but it seems to have died again.

3) Do nothing

We could just leave nip2's hacked-about gtksheet where it is. It's
only two files (12k lines of code), no longer a huge amount, in my
opinion.

John