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

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org> writes:

> 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.

> 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."

Martin,

While I appreciate that you are frustrated by not being able to start
working on porting everything to GTK+/GNOME-2.0 now, I think you are
completely missing the point here.

GNOME 2 is a different platform from GNOME 1. And has to be a
different platform than GNOME 1.

If you think you can have a version of libbonobo that can be compiled
either against GTK+-1.2 or GTK+-2.0, then tell me:

 Does libbonobo.so.1 link against libgtk-1.2.so.0 or 
 libgtk-2.0.so.0

If you that the answer is to use separate prefixes and to switch your
LD_LIBRARY_PATH back and forth as you try to use one or the other,
than I'll tell you: I've been there, done the pain. It isn't worth it.
If we go with your course, the signature of a GNOME developer will be
a big dent in the wall next to their head.

And all this pain of incompatible versions with the same name, and
#ifdefs and feature-creap in the GTK+-1.2 branch is completely
wasted, because if we maintainers don't branch there code into
stable and devel branches after GUADEC, we are completely screwed:

 - We are completely screwed for GNOME-1.4 because we won't have
   a stable GNOME-1.4 platform.

 - We are completely screwed for GNOME-2.0, because we won't
   make our deadlines, because the code will be twice as  
   hard to write, test, and maintain as it needs to be.

 - We are completely screwed for GNOME-2.0, because any library
   that is compiling against GTK+-1.2 and GTK+-2.0 will only
   be a half-done, incomplete port to GTK+-2.0, won't properly 
   internationalize, won't be properly accessible, etc.

If you want to procede on GNOME-2.0 migration, hassle package
maintainers to make their 1.4 branches now - we are supposed to be
completely frozen for GNOME-1.4 in a week anyways.

Regards,
                                        Owen