[Pipet Devel] Gnome stuff

[Brad Chapman]

Oh great locians;
	Jeff and Gary--thanks much for mentioning this interview. As I read
throught it with the brand new ToDo list in hand, I had a couple of
questions about what is relevant/not relevant to Loci:

1. Bonobo: What are everyone's thoughts on the reliance of Loci on Bonobo?
It sounds like, if I read the description correctly, Bonobo implements a
wrapper around CORBA which allows linking of multiple objects or, to quote
from the interview: 'Think "multi-directional pipes".' Is the plan for
implementing Loci to make it a wrapper around Bonobo so that we have:

(((Loci ((Bonobo (CORBA/ORBit) Bonobo)) Loci)))

or rather, a wrapper around a wrapper around ORBit? I guess this falls into
ID. and IE. in the ToDo outline: CORBA and Bonobo integration (well, and
also VIC. python bindings for bonobo!)

2. GConf: This is described in the interview as "an API for storing
configuration data...for now just XML text files." Is this something that
can be utilized for storing the core scripting language described in II. of
the ToDo?

3. The as-yet-unamed replacement for the GMC file manager: According to the
interview this new manager "..is designed to be able to plug in Bonobo
components so that you can install viewers for different types of files or
different file systems altogether." Is this something that we should
investigate for representing the Loci file system (ie. IIIA.) or am I
totally off in thinking it does a simiar thing to what we need for managing
files?

	Is there more stuff in there that could be useful to us? How about
other gnome stuff that I haven't mentioned here? I guess I am not
completely clear on how much Loci will be integrated into the GNOME project
so if anyone could "throw me a friggin' bone" on this, I would be quite
appreciative!
	Along these lines, if we are going to be using a lot of gnome
libraries/programs, do you think it would be worthwhile to keep a listing
of "useful gnome stuff" or something along those lines, to make it easier
to dig into the gnome api's? Also, maybe this way we could divide up the
process of understanding different parts of gnome and thus making the
learning curve for diving into it a little less steep... (at least for me!)

Brad