Programmer's comments on programmer's criticism of GTK2

[Fabio Rotondo <mlists rotondo it>]

Hi list,

 I have silently followed the thread "Programmer's Criticism of GTK2".
I think many of you have their rights in complaining about how difficult
and complex is developing with GTK2.

It is also obvious that all GTK2 criticims arrive right now that the 
"official"
2.0.0 has been released.

I am playing with GTK2 since the "old" 1.3.8 and I have had the time to
write my own "wrapper" around the libs. My wrapper is by no mean as
flexible as the original GTK2 libs, but it does the work I need, and it does
it pretty well.

GTK2 has a lot of new features, many of them are really exciting (at 
list from
my point of view). The new Pixbuffer, for example, is a real perl. The 
ability of
having icons casting alpha shadows is another great feature "ready to use"
(you could achieve the same effect on GTK1.2, but it was pretty hard).
Also, docs have been enhanced. They are still far from being perfect, 
but at least
they have been updated and increased a lot.

I think that most of the concern on GTK2 came from the drop out of 
CList. The CList was
a great and flexible widget. It was easy to use and used widespread.
I have wrapped a "new" CList around a GTKTreeView, but it is far from 
being as fast and flexible
as it was the original GTK 1.2 CList.
This was my fault. I could have had a look to GtkTreeView model before 
the release of the "2.0.0", and
maybe, filing a bug in Bugzilla, I could have a CList-like widget in the 
official GTK2 distribution.
But the new model was very complex and I posticipated the analysis, 
wrapping other GTK2 widgets in
my library and now it is too late (at least for 2.0.0).

Havoc, it's true that anyone can continue to use the CList provided in 
the GTK2, but it carries a very bad word
with it: "deprecated". Every programmer in the world, with a bit of 
conscience would lot use a deprecated widget.
So, my plea is for a new widget doing the same things the "original" 
CList was able to do (including colouring rows)
with a simple API.

That's what I think about GTK2.

--
Ciao,
  Fabio
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