Re: GTK on Macintosh OSX

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Jul 13, 2009, at 6:04 AM, Owen Taylor wrote:

> On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 07:29 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> There is no fixed "core" GTK+ team.
>
> The way we've always determined who gets listed in the GTK+ release
> announcements as the "team" is simply to look at who has done lots of
> work and taken ownership of components.
>
> [ It looks like the team list in some of the recent release
> announcements has gotten a bit stale; the 2.16 list includes me among
> some other people not doing much work at the moment. ]
>
> If someone wants to make sure that the OS/X port is released working  
> out
> of the box for 2.18, they have to be building from git, fixing  
> problems
> that come up, going through patches in bugzilla, etc.
>
> And then that person will be on the "team" and the team can make the
> commitment you want.
>
> In the past, when I've made changes that require per-backend changes,
> I've generally tried to stub out the necessary parts of the other
> backends if stubs make any sense. E.g.,
>
>  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587247
>
> Adds a backend function that is called after processing updates;
> backends that don't need to do anything there don't need to do  
> anything
> so stubbing out was very reasonable. But other changes do require  
> actual
> work, and requiring every person submitting a patch to GDK to:
>
> A) Have a OS/X machine and a windows machine
> B) Know enough about OS/X and windows programming to make changes
>
> Doesn't seem reasonable. (As you say.) Requiring people making changes
> to GDK to provide the docs and test cases so that the people  
> maintaining
> the backends can easily add the missing functionality is, on the other
> hand, quite reasonable.
>
> - Owen

http://www.gtk.org/development.html certainly gives the impression  
that there exists a core and a team, though not necessarily a core team.

Perhaps I should rephrase my question a bit more harshly:
Is http://www.gtk.org/download-macos.html still true? Is there someone  
with commit authority who is working hard to finish gtk's quartz  
backend? Working on tickets? Applying patches?
Or should gtk-osx.sourceforge.net (and maybe live.gnome.org/gtk+)  
include a warning that GTK mostly works on OSX for the moment, but  
can't be recommended for new development because it has no active  
maintainer?

No, I'm not volunteering.

Regards
John Ralls