Re: About GTK+ 3.0 and deprecated things

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Morten Welinder <mwelinder gmail com> wrote:

[ lots of whining cut out]

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

GTK2 is not going away any time soon. Enterprise distributions will have
to keep it alive in maintenance mode for a long time to come (RHEL 5
is still shipping gtk 1.2).

> 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

Nothing that is hard about maintaining 2.x will not be hard for 3.x.
The argument that the proponents of the current 3.x agenda make is
that the current state of the code makes it increasingly impossible to add
new features.

Regarding your GtkPrint comment, I have to point out that moving increasing
amounts of the platform into GTK+ does not magically grow the GTK+
maintainership at the same rate. You could improve the situation by sending
a patch every once in a while...you do seem to have enough time to do
statistical analysis on the GTK+ svn logs, after all :-)


Matthias