[Gretl-devel] gtksourceview dev

[Allin Cottrell]

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.