Re: Gnome 2 infinity and beyond [was Re: Tango and 2.16]

[Steve Frécinaux <nudrema gmail com>]

(forgot to cc the list)

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> We can also enforce the best practices by leaving the deprecated
> interfaces *behind*.   For example, currently we have the library
> gtk+-2.0.  When gtk+ goes 3.x, we will rename the base library to
> gtk+-3.0, and leave all the deprecated stuff in a dummy gtk+-2.0
> which itself will depend on gtk+-3.0, pulling all the
> non-deprecated stuff in.  The effect is that applications written
> for gtk+-2.0 will continue to work and compile still, but those
> targeting gtk+-3.0 do not see the deprecated interfaces.  A bit
> hackish, but I thought I would say.

I agree with this. This could also been seen as a way to fix some
insanities and weirdness in the way GTK behaves, since the api could be
slightly broken (the gtk2 legacy package could then implement a layer to
hide those api changes)

I don't think of this as being hackish. It looks more like a clean way
of making the transition, especially if you don't rewrite the whole
library (but conserving the gtk-2 ABI with such an overlap might be
difficult).