[crossfire] skill window

[Mark Wedel]

  My fairly random thoughts on all of this:

- The space used up for the tab for skills & exp is minimal, so for most 
layouts, the cost of keeping it in place isn't very high.

- Changes where someone else disagrees with that change are always a problem - 
this can also happen in maps.  In general, if it is the person that originally 
did the work that disagrees with it, decisions on changes is left to them - 
however, opinions can be swayed also by what other people say.

- In the ideal world, this would be something each user could decide on via 
setting or the like.  I'm not sure how realistic this is, but I can certainly 
see why there may be different opinions.  For myself, I have a lot of screen 
real-estate, so if I want to see that skills and exp, keeping that window up all 
the time isn't an issue.  But for others, I could see the crossfire game window 
using up all the screen space they have, so keeping up another window would just 
hide something else, and having that tab there is handy.

  At one time, GNOME had the idea of dockable widgets (don't know if it still 
does), so you could move widgets around, dock them here, there, etc.  If that is 
still possible, it would basically let users customize the interface however 
they want (don't want the skills tab?  Just dump it in the trash).

  A concern I have is that if one has too many options (checkboxes for what 
stuff to show in the client vs windows), you potentially have a dozen checkboxes 
down the road of what to show or not show - that isn't great.

- The number of glade files probably needs to be controlled in some way - 
otherwise,  I could forsee a mass increase here, and the question then becomes 
who supports them all.

  One thought is to take 3-4 core glade files and call them the 
standard/supported ones, and the rest fall into a contrib area.  What that means 
is that if bugs are filed against the core ones, they should get fixed - if 
filed against contrib ones, they don't, but whoever contributed that layout file 
may feel compelled to fix it (or may not) - if a contributed layout gets so out 
of date it isn't usable, it gets removed.

- It would be nice to have a better way of switch layout files, or at least 
seeing what they are.  Having a .png file of each layout that that is perhaps 
displayed would be one way.  I would imagine it isn't impossible to have it 
reconfigure the layout in real-time, but it may require destroying all the 
widgets and re-creating them (this becomes an issue for images).  My only 
thought here is that I do wonder how many of those layouts really are used, 
given that the mechanism for switching does require a restart (I don't know if 
I'd want to restart my client 12 times to see all the different layouts)

  Probably got a bit off topic on some of these.