Blueprint port

[lo2dev]

With blueprint becoming part of the upcoming runtime, it may be worth trying to switch to blueprint for UI files, if it desired of course.

[GeopJr]

if it desired of course

I don't want my personal preferences and thoughts to be a blocker for this but I'll lay them out anyway:

1. it is yet another dependency. This used to be my biggest issue with it, since it wasn't widely used and packaged. This doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.
2. XML/Builder is used in all tutorials for decades now which might be more approachable to newcomers.
3. I'm unfortunately pretty much the only person working on Tuba so switching to blueprint will only affect me :/

If the community as a whole moves to blueprint, I'll do so too, so how about we wait for 49-50?

[lo2dev]

2. As someone that was fortunate/unfortunate? enough to get into gnome dev when blueprint was already a thing, it made looking at XML docs harder cuz there was just so much boilerplate noise. I would always say "Damn wish these docs were in blueprint". But i understand the argument either way
3. That's totally fair. I opened this issue because i was hacking on tuba's UI and XML really just has a way of making it hard for me to quickly hack things together

i could try porting in my own fork until later on and see how it goes

[GeopJr]

As someone that was fortunate/unfortunate? enough to get into gnome dev when blueprint was already a thing, it made looking at XML docs harder cuz there was just so much boilerplate noise. I would always say "Damn wish these docs were in blueprint". But i understand the argument either way

I'm not saying I'm a huge fan of XML either but even as someone 'experienced' on gtk & friends, I do often find myself doing the occasional path:*.ui Adw<insert-weird-widget> github search when dealing with new or uncommon widgets (especially with those in-line gtk factories). I can only imagine that newcomers do it even more often and I doubt there are many apps using blueprint that also use these weird and complicated widgets much (I often find 1 or even 0 results for XML).

But again, I am going to follow the community, and if the community has moved on so will I :)

---

I made this branch https://github.com/GeopJr/Tuba/tree/experiment/feat/blueprint, if you have done any progress on blueprint migration, feel free to PR it against it and so will I when I get some time for it. I'll keep the blueprint files up-to-date with any future changes to the XML ones until merged!

[lo2dev]

Just a lil update: i tried to port to blueprint, but some things failed to be ported automatically by blueprint-compiler so imma put the port on hold for now 😃