Re: About compatibility in GNOME 2 (was Re: Compatibility stuff)

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> Any maintainer who accepts a patch to build against two GTK versions
> is insane, even if the number of ifdefs is only 5. It's flat-out a bad
> idea. Use a branch.
> 
> Re-read Owen's mail; typically the port to GTK 2 allows you to
> simplify code a lot, or use new features in GTK 2. There's no point
> porting to GTK 2 if you aren't going to use any GTK 2 features, which
> you can't do if you continue to work with GTK 1.2.

I think your "ignorance" here doesn't help the GNOME 2 platform at all.

Imagine this (P = potential GNOME 2 contributor, M = me):

P: "I want to help with porting to / testing GNOME 1.x application Foo to/on
    the GNOME 2.0 platform, what can I do to help you ?"

M: "There's not much you do at the moment. Ask the maintainer of library
    Bar which is required by Foo to branch it and to port it to GTK+ 2.0."

P: "But can't we make a set of patches for library Bar and tell people that
    they must apply to patches to their copy of Bar if they want to try out
    Foo on GNOME 2.0."

M: "Well, no. This doesn't work. The problem is that the GTK+ team refuses
    to keep the number of changes that are required to port Bar to GTK+ 2.0
    small."

P: "What do you mean by this ?"

M: "Well, first of all, if you port Bar to GTK+ 2.0, this'll change its code
    at a couple hundreds of different locations cluttered up all over the
    whole module. And when you're done with it, Bar won't work on GTK+ 1.2.x
    anymore."

P: "Can't we rearrange Bar's code in a way that all these differences will
    be in one source file so that we just need to provide a different version
    of that file ?"

M: "No, that's impossible."

....

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)

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