Re: The 1.2 branch

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2003-05-25 at 19:55, Magnus Bergman wrote:

> I was just wondering if there is any development of the 1.2 branch. A few of the 
> programs I'm using regularly hasn't yet been ported to 2.x (including
> mozilla and sylpheed). There are some problems with these programs 
> related to GTK+. For example the behaviour of the file dialogue and
> the button placement in most dialogues (not conforming to the GNU
. HIG). I realize that some of the changes I have in mind will (at least
> potentially) break existing programs. But does there exist some patch
> to fix this or is there any general interest in one (if I end up
> making one myself)?

[ Note that the GTK+-2.x port of Mozilla works quit well ]

There is no development going on on the 1.2.x branch. We haven't
made a release in over 2 years, and it should be considered dead.

Under no circumstances would we consider changes that would have 
any possibility of breaking existing programs, such as a change
to button placement on the stable branch.

Bug fixes are a different issue ... we kept doing bug fixes 
releases for 2 years after the release of 1.2, and given 
sufficient resources, we'd have done a few more.

There are some patches that anybody doing packages of 
GTK+-1.2.10 should be using ... they can found in the Red Hat 
GTK+-1.2 source RPM. One of those patches fixes the problem
where changing directories loses the filename in the file
selector.

If you want a jazzed-up GTK+-1.2 file selector you might
want to look at the Ximian patch to do that ... while I'd 
consider it dangerous in principle, it's been around long to 
prove that it works well in practice.

Regards,
                                             Owen


Q: If someone interested in doing maintenance branch
   releases turned up, would it make sense to let them 
   go ahead and do it?

A: It depends, but probably not

 - We don't have any resources to do patch review and 
   supervision, so if someone was doing 1.2.x branch
   maintenance, they'd have to be a pretty experienced
   GTK+ hacker that we could trust to work on their
   own and not make things worse.

 - I don't want to distract from the message that GTK+-1.2
   is unsupported and people need to port.
 
   While there are probably a dozen obvious fixes one would
   apply if making a 1.2.11, there are *hundreds* of bugs
   that are relevant to the 1.2.x branch that have since
   been fixed and not backported.

   Not to mention areas where GTK+-1.2 was just fundamentally
   broken and the code has been entirely replaced. Like
   the old GtkText widget.