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

[Eric Lemings <eric b lemings lmco com>]

Martin Baulig wrote:
> 
> 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.

As a Gtk+/GNOME application developer, I think I would do this before I
placed platform-dependent conditional compilation into my code,
especially considering the differences between Gtk+ 1.2 and Gtk+ 2.0
API.  (That would be a LOT of conditional code.)  If the differences are
relatively small, like porting from GNOME 1.2 to GNOME 1.4 (if there are
any API differences), then I would probably seperate my
platform-dependent code instead and just add more checks to my
configuration and build files.

I seriously doubt that many developers will want to maintain two
versions of the same application for GNOME 1.2 and GNOME 2.0 anyways:
either they'll stick with GNOME 1.2 or they'll bite the bullet and make
the jump to GNOME 2.0.

Just my two cents on this thread.

Eric.