Re: About GTK+ 3.0 and deprecated things

["Morten Welinder" <mwelinder gmail com>]

> Hmm, strangely most code worked fine with GTK+ 2.0 with a recompile...
> (e.g., I remember doing that for gftp, not a trivial app.)

That sounds like a serious case of selective memory.  Or maybe gftp
has the ui from "hello, world".

Here's a partial list of suffering that we went through.  Let's see...

* All widgets has to be reworked and audited.  There was new reference
  handling and double destroy calls added to the trouble.

* All glade files needed to be redone, or at the very least subjected to
  heavy post-translation surgery with Emacs and Perl.

* All code needed to be audited for UTF-8.

* All font handling had to be reworked.  Drawing changed too.

* Whenever something crashed, leaked, or otherwise simply did not work,
  we had to audit not only our own code, but glib, pango, and gtk+ too.
  There were piles and piles of bugs in the new code.

* We had to struggle with sluggishness of the resulting gtk2 application.

The above is just what I can remember off the bat and is *before*
changing to use the new widgets of gtk2, some of which were only
partial replacements of what they deprecated: the tree view, for
example, was touted as right for all kinds of tables, but it has
become clear that it cannot handle large ones.

Gnumeric has about 34k lines dedicated to dialogs, not including code
that implements the actions of those dialogs.  Add to that 20k lines of
widgets and another 20k lines of further gui code.  That excludes code
for graphs.  You just do not audit that in a weekend or two.

You want us to go through some variant of that every 3-4 years?  That's
insane!

What, exactly, is it that is hard about maintaining 2.x that will not be
hard for 3.x?  I have seen nothing but unsubstantiated assertions
about this.  What I have observed is that sub-systems like GtkPrint
get dumped in and abandoned right away.  With bayesian mind
that tells me that the maintenance situation will not be better for 3.x

What really bothers me is that people go out of their way to break working
code.  Looking at svn logs tells me that the effort of keeping the old widgets
and methods around is minimal.  It's not just the old gtkclist -- the recently
deprecated gtktooltips shows the same thing.  The second unsubstantiated
assertion is that the deprecated widgets cause a lot of maintenance work
beyond the self-inflicted pain of deprecation.  The data does not support
that assertion.

I would like to see all this gtk3 talk pushed 3-4 years out into the future.
There are lots of things that need to be fixed and introducing new,
buggy code elsewhere is not going to fix it.  If that means the world
will have to wait for animated, semi-transparent widgets, then that
would be fine.  No real work will get done of behalf of those features
anyway.

Morten Welinder

PS: For whatever it's worth, GnuCash also took years to go gtk2.