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

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2009, John Ralls wrote:

> On Nov 10, 2009, at 7:50 AM, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 10 Nov 2009, Paul Davis wrote:
> >
> >> I do not believe that using a pre-built GTK OS X framework is
> >> desirable for users or developers. Include GTK as part of your
> >> app bundle. Its not hard to do and gives you complete control
> >> over which version of GTK is used by your app.
> >
> > I think this confuses two issues. I include a pre-built GTK as
> > part of my app bundle for OS X, just as I do for MS Windows.
> > It is difficult for me to build the GTK stack for OS X myself
> > because I work on Linux and have only occasional access to an OS X
> > machine.
> >
> > With the win32 binaries available from gtk.org, one can select the
> > pre-built package that works best (i.e. "complete control over GTK
> > version").  It would be great to be able to do that with OS X too,
> > though of course I understand that Kris Rietveld casn't be
> > expected to do all the work this would involve!
>
> Interesting point. ISTM that a framework is perhaps not the best
> solution in this case. A tarball of the gtk+ and dependencies
> installation folder would be easy to provide and would integrate well
> with autotools. Would that help you? If so, what would be a good
> prefix to build it into?

Thanks for the reply, and these are good questions.  I admit the
analogy with building for MS Windows is not perfect.

* For a Windows build I use pre-built GTK "dev" files (for a
cross-build on Linux), and distribute pre-built runtime files
(DLLs etc.) with my app.

* On OS X I use a pre-built GTK framework for both development and
distribution.  I currently use the OS X/X11 build of GTK 2.14.3
available from the R project.  The dmg includes the required
headers and pkgconfig files, so in building a GTK app all one has
to do is give the right PKG_CONFIG_PATH. End-users don't need the
"dev" files, but they get them anyway.

It might be nice to have distinct pre-built "dev" and runtime GTK
packages for OS X, and in that case it would probably make sense
for the dev package to take the form of a tarball rather than a
framework dmg.  I guess my choice would be to root it in /opt/gtk
or some such, but I don't think that matters a great deal.

Allin Cottrell