New PurplePrefType: string with hint list

Ethan Blanton elb at pidgin.im
Tue Aug 7 09:59:30 EDT 2012


Tomasz Wasilczyk spake unto us the following wisdom:
> I'm still trying to improve usability of Pidgin for Gadu-Gadu users,
> so I came up with another idea for libpurple API. Among others, we
> have pref types which maps to GtkComboBox and GtkEntry. I need
> something like GtkComboBoxEntry - entry box with drop-down list with
> some hint-values.

This seems like a reasonable and valuable addition to me in general. 
Some things to think about:

 * In prefs.xml, you probably want to store only inactive entries that
   the *user* has added; inactive entries added by the prpl at
   initialization should be suppressed.

 * In some cases, we may have been able to take advantage of this in
   the past in ways that we don't necessarily *want* to; for example,
   there have been multiple possible auth servers for OSCAR
   (particularly for ICQ, I think?), but we generally don't want users
   using anything but the default, so we wouldn't want to provide
   alternation.  We need to think hard about what prefs get this sort
   of treatment -- the GG server makes me suspicious, for example.

 * Your point re: XMPP ports may fall into the point above, but if it
   does not, is this an argument for an int selector as well as a
   string selector?

 * I think IRC connection encoding is a perfect example of where this
   pref is legitimate.  There are an almost infinite number of
   possible encodings for IRC, but in reality only about half a dozen
   are regularly used, and maybe fewer.

Ethan
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 482 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/attachments/20120807/ba7d301f/attachment.sig>


More information about the Devel mailing list