Thank you for the quick response! I'm not sure anything short of direct access to the widget tree would suffice for a GTK4 version of Plotinus to provide the functionality it does today on GTK3.
The problem is that in practice, some of the most important applications use GTK in an "incomplete" manner. A good example is LibreOffice: It doesn't use GtkApplication, nor does it have GActionMaps, or GMenuModels from which actions can be extracted. There is only a GtkMenuBar widget, which I'm guessing is constructed from some backend-agnostic model inside the LibreOffice GUI stack. Plotinus currently tries the obvious things first, looking for application menus and their models, and falls back to raw widgets if it doesn't find any. It is this fallback feature that allows Plotinus to work with software like LibreOffice, and it is software like LibreOffice where Plotinus is the most useful, since it has hundreds of menu items. Of course, I don't expect LibreOffice to move to GTK4 in the short or even medium term. The major cross-platform applications like Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, and Inkscape have been very reluctant in their adoption of even GTK3, and likely don't fancy another bumpy upgrade anytime soon. Still, eventually they might switch, and it makes sense to anticipate that. For Plotinus to continue supporting "semi-GTK" applications, introspection APIs would need to cover the case where there is nothing but a GtkWindow and a bunch of widgets. The existing D-Bus APIs, for example, all seem to require at least a GApplication. I don't know enough about GTK internals to say which alternatives might be feasible. You mention GIO extension points, a feature I wasn't aware of until now. How could such an extension point look for Plotinus' use case? What information would it provide? And would it work with software that doesn't use GApplication? Thanks & best regards Philipp On Sun, 2018-02-25 at 09:54 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: > Hi; > > On Sun, 25 Feb 2018 at 09:18, Philipp Emanuel Weidmann <pew@worldwide > mann.com> wrote: > > Greetings, > > > > I am the author of Plotinus[1], a GTK+ module that provides a > > searchable command palette to GTK+ applications. Recently, it was > > brought to my attention[2] that module loading has been removed[3] > > on > > GTK+ master. > > > > It appears that this change could mean the end for Plotinus and > > other > > modules like it. I would be interested to learn: > > > > 1. What is the rationale behind the removal of module loading? > > > > The module code was fairly ancient, and was hand rolling things for > which we have better API down the stack, like GIO extension points, > which support things like priorities and prerequisites. > > 2. What will be the first stable release of GTK+ that does not > > support > > modules anymore? Is this GTK+ 4.0+ only, or will support also be > > dropped in a 3.0 series release? > > > > The GTK 3.x series is frozen, so it won’t be touched. This change is > for 4.x only. > > > 3. What, if any, alternatives are available/planned for software > > like Plotinus that needs to inspect the widget hierarchy of > > running > > applications in order to work? > > > > We could be amenable to add an extension point for this, if you > present a case for it, and explain what kind of requirements you need > from the toolkit; granting blanket access to the internals of the > toolkit is not something we’d be happy to provide, but if you have a > specific domain it should be possible to accommodate your extension. > > Alternatively, we could ensure that all our menus and actions are > introspectable from the outside, and give you a proper API for > writing Plotinus in GTK 4.0. We’d probably prefer that. > > Ciao, > Emmanuele. > > > Any insight is appreciated! > > > > Warm regards > > Philipp > > > > > > [1]: https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus > > [2]: https://github.com/p-e-w/plotinus/issues/35 > > [3]: https://github.com/GNOME/gtk/commit/39d1537211501a8603f93a3196 > > b910 > > dce40e1617 > > > > _______________________________________________ > > gtk-devel-list mailing list > > gtk-devel-list@gnome.org > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list > > -- > https://www.bassi.io > [@] ebassi [@gmail.com] _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
