This chapter describes the most rudimentary aspects of a
Gnome application, including initializing the libraries,
marking strings for translation, parsing command line
arguments, saving configuration files, and responding to
requests from the session manager. From here on, the book
assumes you know how to write a simple GTK+-only
application.
On startup, your application must initialize the GTK+ and
Gnome libraries with a call to
gnome_init(). gnome_init()
(Figure 1)
takes the place of gtk_init()
for Gnome apps (it calls
gtk_init() for you).
The first argument to
gnome_init() is a short name for your application,
and the second is a string representing the application's
version. These are used internally by the Gnome libraries
(in some default messages provided by the argument
parser, for example).
Like gtk_init(), gnome_init() parses the command-line
arguments; unlike gtk_init(),
it will not change argc
and argv. If you want to
parse application-specific options, you should use gnome_init_with_popt_table(),
described in the next section.
The return value from
gnome_init() is supposed to be non-zero if
initialization fails, but the current implementation
always returns 0. (gnome_init()
will simply abort if there's a problem, such as a missing
X server.) Common practice is to ignore this return
value, at least in Gnome 1.0, but it's a good idea to
check it anyway in case future versions do return an
error.
[FOOTNOTE - reference after "always returns 0."] Most
people consider this a misfeature, but gtk_init() shared the same problem until
just before Gnome 1.0, so there was little to be done.
Future versions will hopefully fix the problem.
