Re: Steps to get to GTK+ 3.0

[Christian Dywan <christian imendio com>]

Am Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:43:54 +0200
schrieb Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>:

> On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 13:30 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 13:34 +0200, Kristian Rietveld wrote:
> > > [snip]
> > >> We should start to enforce the usage of single header includes
> > >> and not make this optional.  Mitch has been working on this and
> > >> most is already in place in SVN trunk.
> > > [snip]
> > > 
> > > What's the advantage of this? Has this been a real problem for
> > > GTK+ so far?
> > 
> > The main advantages I can think of are:
> > 
> > - When you add/remove/rename header files, you don't break all
> > applications which directly included them.
> 
> This seems like the only change. The rest is just about the
> convenience of using just gtk.h, which already exists.
> 
> Forcing use of single include file does indeed seem useful for API
> stability, though I wonder if it's worth forcing people to include
> everything. Clearly not all people want to include just gtk.h, or
> they'd all be doing it already.

Of course not everybody includes gtk.h at the moment, but that doesn't
mean all of these people don't want to. There's simply no rule at the
moment, so many will probably follow arbitrary code examples they find
or even try out what works. This can even lead to compatibility
problems if Gtk+ adds #include statements to files and suddenly a
developer can get away with different #includes - which breaks builds
against old Gtk+ versions.

In the end, a clear policy is the only way to achieve a predictable
situation.

Regards,
    Christian