Re: About GTK+ 3.0 and deprecated things

["Travis Watkins" <amaranth ubuntu com>]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:51 AM, Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com> wrote:
> I wish people would stop fighting against the "code cleanup release",
> unless they really want to switch to an alternative widget library.
> GTK+ isn't seeing the love it needs, and the strict API/ABI policy of
> GTK+ 2.x mixed with "leaky" public interfaces is seen (by the people
> doing the work) as one of the biggest problems why that is.
>
> If you prevent fixing that with all this stop-energy, it's not going
> to take long for new applications start choosing something less dead
> as their widget set of choice.
>
> So please let the code be revived _now_ when there's a chance it's not
> going to be just undead after the operation and direct the energy to
> implementing the canvas, css theming and animations and whatever. The
> good news is that you don't need to wait for 3.x, you can start the
> work already! The new API and its policy is already known and in SVN
> if I'm not mistaken, so go and hack away!
>

The problem is this "code cleanup release" breaks everyone's
applications for no reason. No one has shown a case where the current
situation makes a fix impossible and no one has proven any interesting
new features (other than whole new widgets, which we can do now) can
be added to 'gtk+ 3.0' without breaking API/ABI. We're going to get
terrible backlash from a 3.0 that has zero new features and I suspect
any of the promised shiny bits will end up having to wait until 4.0
anyway.

In the end all we get is the ability to drop some old widgets no one
spends time on anyway.

-- 
Travis Watkins
http://www.realistanew.com