Re: Commercial Development

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis@mindspring.net> writes:

> > In anyone's opion, is the GTK+ toolkit capable of delivering a nice
> > office suite, such as Corel Suite 8, StarOffice 5.0, or any other
> > commercail-type application?
> 
> It could, but I think that it still is in such a state of flux that I
> would be scared to use it.  In another 6-12 months, my hope is that
> GTK+ will have stabilized enough to allow use in very large projects
> by people other than GTK+ hackers.

I don't think this is a fair characterization. Yes, the development
version is somewhat unstable. That's because the developers of GTK+
make their work-in-progress available.

If someone had started writing a program for GTK+-1.0 when it was
released in the middle of April, they would not have had to make a
single change to their source up to this point in time. Programs
developed for GTK+-1.0 will compile against GTK+-1.0 and run with the
GTK+-1.0 libraries forever.

When GTK+-1.2 is released, programs written for GTK+-1.0 will take
some modifications to compile with GTK+-1.2. (But would continue to
compile and run with GTK+-1.0, of course.)  At that point of time
we'll have documentation of exactly what needs to be changed. My guess
is that the conversion process could be done for a large application
in a matter of a few days.

[ 
  Ideally, we would have kept absolute source compatibility for
  GTK+-1.2, but it became apparent that a few things were better
  changed than left around to cause future problems. 
]

Regards,
                                        Owen