Re: [Gretl-devel] gtksourceview dev
On Fri, 23 May 2008, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
On Fri, 23 May 2008, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> We're not using an installed copy of gtkourceview any more, but
> strictly the slimmed-down version that comes bundled with the
> gretl sources.
I'm sure there are very good reasons to use an in-house version
of gtksourceview, but generally speaking, there are many
advantages from linking to an external library; could you please
explain what the disadvantages are in this case?
Good question.
One of the advantages of using an external library is that you get
to benefit, for free, from bug fixes as new versions of the
library become available, and from new features (if you want to
make use of them).
In the case of gtksourceview, however, the main line of
development has now shifted to gtksourceview-2.0. This has more
dependencies, an incompatible API, and (if I understand
correctly) an incompatible format for the ".lang" language
definition files.
Now, gtksourceview-1.0 is fine for our purposes; and I don't want
to have to support both major versions (remember, this has to work
on Windows and OSX too).
In addition, we're fine with a subset of gtksourceview's
functionality. For example, sourceview will do automatic
indentation and smart tabs, up to a point, but that's of little
use to us because it can't know the gretl syntax as well as we do,
and we're better with home-rolled versions of those functions.
If there are are more bug-fix releases for gtksourceview 1.0 I'll
incorporate the updates. And maybe some day we'll find a reason
to shift to version 2.0 on all platforms.
Allin.