Re: Justifying the GTK+ 3.0 ABI break

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

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:30 AM, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> Every time that a parallel-installable GTK+ 3.0 has been proposed, and
> now that it has been decided, I have asked for a list of actual useful
> features that it will make possible. I've had no luck so far.
>
> We need to offer people a future with some specific advantages so it
> doesn't just look like the GTK+ developers are making their own lives a
> little easier and scratching an unimportant itch. People don't care if
> maintenance is hard for us, but they do care about new features and
> particular bug fixes.
>
> If the code cleanup is really necessary then there should be some things
> we can list that it will make possible. It would be best to have that
> list soon rather than after the slashdot shitstorm hits.

<general thread reply>

I just wanted to jump in and say thankyou to the team for finally standing
up and making this decision, in fact, Ive been crying about this for a while
and would even consider it overdue.

Its been my (mis-?)perception that gtk+ has been under pressure by so
called ISVs for a long time to not break abi, fair. and the Gtk+ team has
made IMO extraordinary efforts to have a clean abi and way of tracking
what is new/deprecated and all.

I think this is not so much of a technical discussion, the point is that
alot of the communal code is contributed by various sources, some
completely volunteer work, other significant portions are sponsored
projects - sponsored projects will always have big features as goals.

I believe that for basic survival of gtk+ codebase (technical reasons
outlined by Behdad and Sven in this thread) - the community has to
be allowed after some time and blow the whistle and do some refactoring.

This refactoring will slim to never be a sponsored work, so all
the thankful users of free and good gtk+ I'm afraid dont get the "right"
to a new feature with an abi break - its not to be mean, we just have
to be understanding of how the resources work (some will undoubtedly
not understand, for gtk+ codebase to survive and evolve, we need to
just ignore those people and prove them wrong with 3.2).

3.0++

Cheers,
                 -Tristan