Re: Get rid of deprecated widgets

["Tristan Van Berkom" <tvb gnome org>]

On Dec 6, 2007 3:04 PM, Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de> wrote:

Hi,
Xavier Bestel schrieb:

> On mer, 2007-12-05 at 14:09 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
>> The only way to make this backwards compatible is to make
>> libgtk-2.0.so.0 have the deprecated symbols and link to
>> libgtk-no-compat-2.0.so.0 which doesn't. Then normal apps will keep
>> working, and apps that don't need compat widgets will need to link with
>> -lgtk-no-compat-2.0.
>
> Each new releases may deprecate some symbols. So what's needed is a
> symbolic library name per release, and say when you release gtk+2.14,
> make libgtk-2.0.so ... libgtk-2.12.so all point to the same thing (with
> all deprecated symbols) which then links to libgtk-2.14.so with only
> supported symbols.

Removing the deprecated stuff is in most cases not an option. But lowering the
impact is. WHat kind of impact have they?

I've been watching this topic for a while, and it comes back up every
so often, I would actually say something quite to the contrary:

Lowering the impact of deprecated widgets and code paths is probably
not ever worth the effort (I dont believe the impact is that great, especially
if you are not pulling in libgnomeui and friends).

OTOH the (quite valid) option of breaking the api could be alot more
useful, who cares about the short term gains - a thorough code cleanup
and refactoring of gtk+ cannot be done without breaking the api,
how can we work on new features/functionality and even code optimization
before breaking the api and refactoring ?

Cheers,
                      -Tristan