Re: Why are no developers completing/maintaining native Gtk+ for OS X?

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Mon, 9 Nov 2009, Kristian Rietveld wrote:

> No, [the Quartz port of GTK+] is not fully complete, but getting
> close.  Recently, I have been working on reviewing outstanding
> patches [and other good stuff] ...  I do not get paid for this
> at all.  Saying that the OS X port is not being actively
> developed is actually close to insulting to me; I have been
> trying my best to pick it up after the previous maintainer
> stopped working on it.

It's good to hear that GTK on Quartz has not gone to sleep; thanks
very much for your work on this!

Unfortunately this is not immediately clear if you google, say,
"gtk osx".  Top of the search is the defunct Immendio page; if you
follow that link you get a redirect to live.gnome.org, which is
pretty much a placeholder. Finally you get to
gtk-osx.sourceforge.net, but this page is a bit "scatter-gun" and,
unlike the old Immendio page, there's no link (that I can find) to
download a current build of GTK for OS X.

You get a d/l link if you go to www.gtk-osx.org, but this offers
GTK 2.14 which is quite dated by now, and gives the impression
there can't be anything going on.  I suspect that many GTK app
developers (who probably work on Linux by preference) really
don't want to build the GTK stack for OS X themselves (any more
than they want to build the stack for win32).  So if there's no
reasonably current d/l available one assumes support is lacking.

Bottom line: If there's any way to improve the web presence of
GTK/OS X, and to provide a current pre-built GTK framework for
downloading, that could make a big difference.

Allin Cottrell