Re: About GTK+ 3.0 and deprecated things

[Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>]

Hi,

Just one thing, the entire starting point of our discussions around GTK 
+ 3.0 was to avoid the 1.2 -> 2.0 pain. The proposed 3.0 is nothing  
like the 1.x->2.0 migration so I'm a bit unsure on the relevance of  
looking into these pains (other than to point out that they will not  
be there this time).

The initial proposal was very careful with introducing new features  
that applications would have to port to for this very reason and we  
focused on what we believe are necessary cleanups and sealing in order  
to be able to continue to develop the toolkit at a feasible rate.

A suggestion that came up in the post-guadec discussions was to move  
deprecated widgets to libgtk3-compat instead of removing them. This  
means that applications using these will have to add that as a  
dependency to his code base in order to continue using them. Off the  
top of my head this sounds like a good suggestion to me.

The 1.x -> 2.0 change was painful for everyone who had an app that  
needed porting, however I find it pretty irrelevant in comparison to  
2.x -> 3.0.

Cheers,
  Mikael

16 jul 2008 kl. 22.51 skrev Morten Welinder:

> > 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.
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