As of GTK+ 3.0 this project is considered complete.

Project Ridley

Goals

Project Ridley is an effort to consolidate a number of external libraries into GTK+.

These libraries are generally small, undermaintained, and buggy. They have an unclear mission (such as libgnome and libgnomeui) or would benefit by being in GTK+ (such as libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui.)

We would be working towards releasing GTK+-3.0 as a result of this work.

Target Libraries

• libgnome (4/7)
• libgnomeui (4/7)
• libgnomeprint22 (2/2)
• libgnomeprintui22 (2/2)
• libglade (1/1)
• libgnomecanvas (0/1)
• libegg (4/9)
• libeel (0/1)
• gtkglext (0/1)
• libsexy (2/5)

API/ABI Clarification

There has been some confusion about the ramifications on GTK+'s API/ABI. There is no plan to break API/ABI as a result of this change. We plan to add API to GTK+ (as has happened during the course of the 2.x series) but we don't plan on removing deprecated widgets.

Criteria

As Owen said in a recent GTK+ meeting, when looking over the list of APIs that we are discussing here, there are basically three categories:

1. Cross-platform API - things that make sense on Windows / OS X
2. X / freedesktop.org-specific API
3. GNOME-specific API

APIs in category A. are clearly suitable for moving to GTK+, APIs in category B. may or may not be suitable, and things in category C. are better off in a GNOME-specific library. An examples for B. would be a session management API that closely follows XSMP, an example for C would be gnome-vfs. Also note that in some cases an API may in principle be cross-platform, even if the current implementation makes heavy use of platform-specific libraries.

libgnome and libgnomeui

There's a comprehensive treatment of these libraries at LibgnomeMustDie

libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui

libglade

We've wanted to move libglade into GTK+ for some time.

libgnomecanvas

There is interest in having a more sophisticated Canvas widget inside GTK+. The current GnomeCanvas codebase is deficient for a number of reasons.

libegg

We don't want to kill off the library, but some widgets have such widespread use that we should move them into GTK+.

There's a list of current libegg usage in GNOME here: http://www.gnome.org/~fpeters/reports/eggs.html

Tracker bug: Bug #349256

libeel

libeel is only used by nautilus and many of the glib extensions in eel are in glib already. There is one piece of eel remaining requested for GTK+.

gtkglext

libsexy

Some widgets from libsexy library are integrated in Gtk+, so we can eliminate libsexy dependency in some applications. There is also a GnomeGoal to do that: GnomeGoals/DropLibsexy