Re: Steps to get to GTK+ 3.0

[Michael Natterer <mitch imendio com>]

[resending since the original reply somehow got lost]

On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 09:44 +0200, 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?
>
> Many people (particularly C++ developers) like to reduce pollution of
> the global namespace by including as few headers as reasonably possible.
> That can also reduce compile times (particularly for C++ developers).

I described the reasons for this in the GIO API review thread here:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2007-December/msg00144.html

All of them are also valid for GTK+, especially the need for maintaining
compatibility of all possible combinations of includes as long as
source compatibility is guaranteed.

We simply do not want to give this completely unneccessary guarentee
any more and therefore we will switch to forcing everybody to only
include <gtk/gtk.h> starting with GTK+ 3.0.

The -DGTK_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES method is simply a path of
migration so you can prepare your code for that.

ciao,
--mitch