Re: GTK on Macintosh OSX

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 2:14 PM, John Ralls<jralls ceridwen us> wrote:
> As you all probably know, Richard Hult has withdrawn from working further on
> the osx/quartz implementation of gtk. You may not know that I have taken
> over the build, bundle, and menu integration part of that and consolidated
> it at http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net.
>
> I'm concerned, though, about how committed the gtk development team is to
> completing and maintaining the internal parts. There are some serious holes
> (pasting and drag-and-drop don't work, just as a particularly egregious
> example). Richard told me that he hoped that some of his former Immendio
> colleagues would step up, but I don't see that that's happening.

I have a fix for drag-n-drop that we have been using with Ardour for
more than a year. I will get into bugzilla for review. Its a pretty
simple patch. Not sure what problem you have with pasting, but that
works fine for all the purposes that we use it for in Ardour.

We bundle Ardour for OS X and chose the "include GTK framework in the
.app". Ardour is fully relocatable - I believe I was responsible for
the description of how to do this that Richard wrote up. Its basically
a matter of using an apple-provided tool to both locate and reset the
paths to every library the app depends on. I have a nice little shell
script that recursively finds every dynamically linked object that the
app uses, copies it into the app structure and then resets the
link-time dependency so that its relative to the app bundle.

Because we have/need a couple of hacks in GTK that are not likely to
go away anytime soon, I can't imagine us being interested in the
"blessed framework" approach.

Regarding the general question of non-X11 backends being 2nd-class
citizens ... yes, I have seen and suffered from this problem when I
was doing work on gtk/osx last year and the previous year. It would be
nice if we could somehow get the core GTK team to commit to not making
changes that are not tested on non-X11 backends, but this seems
unlikely and the reasons are not totally unreasonable.

Given that Ardour on OS X is critical to my income, you can expect me
to have a strong interest in keeping at least some version of GTK
functional on OS X and on continuing to fix issues that we encounter.

--p