Re: Minutes of the GTK+ Team Meeting - 2008-09-23

["Morten Welinder" <mortenw gnome org>]

If all you really want is to change the defaults for box packing, then
why isn't that all you are proposing?  It would be a simple 1-line
patch to gtk_box_pack_start_defaults, if I understand things right.

Some thing will break if you do that, but nowhere near as many things
as with changing the default plus getting rid of hbox/vbox. I suspect
it would not be that many things, because most things currently use
the unaffected box packing methods.  This would be an API break --
semantics changed -- but I don't think the impact would be all that
big.  Glade files, for example, seem to have explicit shrink/expand
data.

If all the benefits is in changing the defaults, there is positively
no reason to run around and deprecate hbox and vbox.  If that part has
a secret benefit ("*huge*" or otherwise) then weigh that against the
pain for application developers.

In other words: you seem to be proposing two separate things here,
only one of them has any stated benefit -- you say *huge*, I say
save-the-occasional extra line.  The other part no-one is even trying
to defend and it is clearly going to be painful for application
developers, especially for anyone targeting 2.x and 3.x at the same
time.  Drop that part asap.

Morten