Re: Application bundles in Gnome OS

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2012-09-19 at 08:36 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-09-19 at 12:40 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> > Additionally, when you talk about the SDK you mean a given set of
> > libraries and core services we consider "stable forever" that everything
> > can rely on. The question then is, whats in this set? I brought up this
> > in the initial main in this thread. It clearly has libc and libX11, but
> > does it have Gtk 3? 
> 
> It's not clear to me it has libX11 - or at least, while we may ship it,
> it may become useless.  One of the major motivators for GTK3 was to
> prepare for an X-less future.
>
> I suppose though, realistically, for the forseeable future we'll need to
> ship X though, at least in a demand-activated configuration.

Yeah, if we want to be able to run current real world application we
need to ship at least an X server. Theoretically apps could bundle the X
libraries as the X protocol itself is ABI stable. I don't quite see the
point in that however, as the X libs are rather ABI stable.

I think the long term future involves Xwayland for X app compatibility
for the forseable future.

> How long we ship GTK+-2 is a related question.

Or at all.

> Anyways for the purposes of discussion here, let's assume GTK3 is stable
> and we'll ship it forever?
> 
> > If so, what version? It has historically not been
> > super-abi stable, especially wrt themes and other such fringe things.
> 
> Third party themes are totally different from apps; they're
> "extensions".

Thats not what I mean though. I meant that the CSS syntax that Gtk3
supports for themeing, which is availible via various Gtk+ API calls
have changed over the Gtk3 lifecycle, such that an Gtk 3.2 app that
loads some custom css may well not work correctly with Gtk 3.4. We're
not strictly ABI incompat as the program will not die due to a linker
error, but neighter will it do what the program expects.