[Gtk-sharp-list] My Very Own Wish List for Gtk#

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hey guys,

    Here is a list of a few things I would like to see in Gtk# myself,
purely selfish, totally and purely selfishly:

	* Custom written ToString () methods for various classes to
	  represent interesting data types and generate useful
	  information.  Someone provided already some patches,
	  and I was lame enough not to commit them ;-)

	* Color integration.  Every place where Gtk takes a color,
	  have an overloaded function that would take a
	  System.Drawing.Color, because there are plenty of useful
	  constants there that could be used.

	* Documentation wise: currently the generator sticks some
	  /// <summary> tags all over the place.  In Mono we are 
	  going to use a different scheme for documenting APIs, 
	  so I would personally like those removed ;-)

	  And probably in the future we can have gtk-doc just
	  spit out the stuff that Mono Doc would use.

	* Extra unrefs.  I discussed this shortly today with Rachel,
	  it is a bit hard to pin point which objects needs to have
	  their reference count returns flagged for fixing, as the
	  error does not always happen when the unref happens, but
	  sometime later, due to some other widget keeping a reference.

	  What we might want to have in the meantime is some debug
	  mode for a function called `my_object_unref', that would
	  poke into the GObject internal and reduce the refcount, but
	  not free the structure.

	  If my_object_unref ever runs into something that has a
	  refcount of zero, it could report a nice error, and maybe
	  even throw a handy exception that is later wrapped and
	  printed out.

	  Currently am running my gtk# without unrefs, because it
	  crashes the debugger.  I know, I know ;-)

	* text/length methods in gtk, like:

	  SetSurrounding(string text, int len, int cursor_index) 

	  Gtk has a number of instances of methods that take text/length
	  arguments, which I believe is slightly lame.  I do not mind
	  keeping these APIs, but ideally, it would be nice to have also
	  the shortcut:

	  SetSurrounding (string text, int cursor_index)

	  Ie, the length for the text is provided by the binding
	  directly.

That is all for now,
Miguel.