Re: Draft GTK+ release announcemnet

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

You probably want to either say "highlights" a bunch of times and
mention only the key improvements, or move the lists of improvements
into a separate document linked from the announce. Right now it's
worded as if the lists are exhaustive, and then the lists aren't very
long. It's very unimpressive-sounding. We should convey the size and
scope of how much better GTK 2 is than GTK 1.2, and exactly how much
effort was involved. ;-)

Perhaps a link to http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/porting/
or to the Common Questions piece of the manual which in turn links to
that - I'm sure "how do I port" and "how do I learn about the new
APIs" will be the top FAQs right after the announce.
(The other FAQ I expect is about the 2.x roadmap including things like
file selector, but we aren't prepared to answer that one...)

Pointing people at gtk-demo here or in release notes wouldn't be
awful, since it's a new feature.

Random hype about kLOC might not be terrible, to emphasize the sheer
scope of additional features being added.

Some fun hype based on something jrb said Sven (I think) had done:
"The huge feature set of GTK+ 2.0 doubles the size of GTK+ 1.2, moving
from XXX lines of code to XXX lines of code. Nonetheless a
statically-linked version of gtk-demo can still fit on a 1.4M floppy
disk with room to spare. Over the last three years a line of code was
added to GTK+ every 5 minutes."

Consider mentioning that the license is LGPL and allows anyone to use
the toolkit with no license fees. "GTK+ is the only 100% free-of-cost
industrial-strength modern GUI toolkit available today"

Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:
> gdk-pixbuf:
> 
>  The gdk-pixbuf library for image loading and manipulation is now
>  integrated into GTK+. Enhancements over the standalone gdk-pixbuf
>  include support for animated images, and for more formats of 
>  still images.
> 

Also image saving.

> GDK:
>
>  Enhancements to the GDK library, which is the interface between
>  the GTK+ widgets and the underlying windowing system include:
>

Other possibilities:

 - use of GObject system for GDK objects, facilitating language
   bindings, improving consistency, and allowing derivation 
   of new GdkDrawable types

 - extension of GdkRGB to handle all visuals and colormaps, 
   eliminating the need to manually allocate colors

 - Support for rendering text using the Pango infrastructure
  
> Widgets improvements:
>

Perhaps "new widgets" rather than "widget improvements" since to my
mind the main widget improvements are the countless little things like
nice API for optionmenu, spinbutton, progressbar, statusbar, etc.
 
>   * Complete support for Unicode and internationalized text via Pango
>     throughout all GTK+ widgets.

Mention bidirectional and complex text specifically?

>   * Useability improvements, including comprehensive support for keyboard
>     navigation.

Needs a hype adjective such as "Innumerable" ;-)
 
>   * Hundreds of improvements to the programming interfaces to address
>     specific difficulties developers had with earlier versions of
>   GTK+.

This is a really big set of changes mushed into one
not-very-interesting-sounding bullet point.

How about - "Systematically simplified and enhanced the API based on
thousands of user requests and questions fielded by the GTK+ team."

Havoc