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Bug 171940 - Add a time machine to GTK+
Add a time machine to GTK+
Status: RESOLVED NOTGNOME
Product: gtk+
Classification: Platform
Component: .General
unspecified
Other All
: Normal enhancement
: future
Assigned To: gtk-bugs
gtk-bugs
Depends on:
Blocks: 775531
 
 
Reported: 2005-03-29 05:58 UTC by Matthias Clasen
Modified: 2018-02-11 00:33 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: Unversioned Enhancement



Description Matthias Clasen 2005-03-29 05:58:52 UTC
Please describe the problem:
Having a time machine in the toolkit would be nice for multiple reasons. We
could go back and fix tree models, and redo DND.

Also, it would make all bugs trivially reproducable...

Steps to reproduce:


Actual results:


Expected results:


Does this happen every time?


Other information:
Comment 1 Jonathan Blandford 2005-03-29 06:41:15 UTC
This will break ABI, but that's probably okay.
Comment 2 Tor Lillqvist 2005-03-29 07:02:17 UTC
And we could finally spell "creat" with an "e".
Comment 3 Anders Carlsson 2005-03-29 07:10:27 UTC
Also, we could go forward in time, fetch the code for GTK+ 4.0 and we'll have an ultra-modern toolkit 
in no-time at all!
Comment 4 Billy Biggs 2005-03-29 13:31:56 UTC
Note: this bug breaks eclipse.
Comment 5 Elijah Newren 2006-01-06 23:57:43 UTC
Please make the API for the time machine publically accessible so that apps (and WMs using gtk+ such as Metacity) can make use of it too.
Comment 6 Matthias Clasen 2006-01-08 06:12:34 UTC
gtk_back_to_the_future () ?
Comment 7 iain 2007-04-17 14:06:38 UTC
This is something that should be done with multiple desktop environment's input in the process and is probably more appropriate for fdo rather than gtk. I don't want to have to have both (hypothetical) GTimeMachine and timemaKhine on my systems.
Comment 8 Ray Strode [halfline] 2008-02-11 19:27:51 UTC
any progress on this, Matthias?
Comment 9 Ray Strode [halfline] 2008-03-10 02:48:12 UTC
Would be good if this could be looked at for the hackfest...
Comment 10 Behdad Esfahbod 2008-03-10 10:00:44 UTC
We gave it a try.  Some of us wrote a time machine and were testing it, but they disappeared.  We're waiting a few years for them to get back (or is that forward?) to the hackfest.
Comment 11 Tobias Mueller 2009-01-24 00:22:22 UTC
Okay this bug is NEEDINFO for quite some time now. Can we close this one? -.-
Comment 12 iain 2009-01-25 02:37:51 UTC
Its only been NEEDINFO for some time if you don't have GtkTimemachine installed. For those of us with it installed, its only been NEEDINFO for about 2 and a half seconds.

So, that said, I think it should remain open.
Comment 13 Tobias Mueller 2009-07-08 03:01:52 UTC
Oh, I actually did have a timemachine back then. I actually even used it to see that it'd be NEEDINFO in the future (that was right now back then)!
Apparently, I can see now that it's not NEEDINFO in the (next) future anymore, so I'll just leave it as it is.
Comment 14 Tobias Mueller 2010-02-13 13:47:59 UTC
Note: Introspection should be supported as well so that it can be bound for Python or JavaScript easily.
Comment 15 iain 2010-08-06 18:17:09 UTC
What scientific breakthrough has obsoleted the time machine? Is it something to do with string theory?
Comment 16 Ray Strode [halfline] 2011-10-17 19:31:27 UTC
If we decide to rewrite this before the time travellers with the initial code dump come back, we should consider looking into using faster-than-light neutrinos.
Comment 17 Jasper St. Pierre (not reading bugmail) 2012-10-15 22:44:21 UTC
As discussed at the summit, Ryan's new GDateTime stuff is accurate to historical data accumulated in the 1600s. It might take a little bit longer, but we're finally making progress!
Comment 18 Jeremy Nickurak 2014-09-16 17:27:33 UTC
I'm pretty sure we get this for free on systemd with the OnCalendar= specifier in unit files.
Comment 19 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2015-09-15 20:34:58 UTC
Ah, but wouldn't it require integrating a web-compliant just-in-time (so to speak) "time compression" engine to add time at the end of the day? Since GtkHTML is essentially dead (even "Evolution" itself has switched to WebKit now...) and Mozilla/Firefox did not want to handle it in Gecko/XULrunner (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60455), we might have to integrate WebKit into GTK+. It should be trivial.

We just have to be careful about WebKit's JavaScriptCore, from a security standpoint: it could be a vector for some heisenbugs. We don't want to accidentally hack too much time, or we could end up in the goddamned Viking Age.

Anyway, integrating the Web should make us all future-proof, at least.
Comment 20 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2016-12-02 16:15:58 UTC
Just realized how badly we need this for GNOME Calendar (bug #775531)...

Not sure if systemd's "OnCalendar=" specifier would be useful once we put it
"on GNOME Calendar"...
Comment 21 Matthias Clasen 2018-02-10 05:27:22 UTC
We're moving to gitlab! As part of this move, we are moving bugs to NEEDINFO if they haven't seen activity in more than a year. If this issue is still important to you and still relevant with GTK+ 3.22 or master, please reopen it and we will migrate it to gitlab.
Comment 22 Emmanuele Bassi (:ebassi) 2018-02-11 00:33:46 UTC
I strongly encourage you to file a bug against the Universe product on the Reality bug tracker, about the directionality of the arrow of time.

Additionally, you may want to check with the maintainers of the Universe if they can add a configuration toggle for the Novikov self-consistency principle, in case we do end up back in time, otherwise we won't be able to fix any mistake.