Re: gtk_widget_draw()

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 09:00 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> What
> puzzles me is the mental effort that appears to go into avoiding what
> to me seems like the inevitable conclusion of this evolution:
> GTK-as-scene-graph. We inherited a very particular mindset from the
> early X toolkits, and its taking us a very long time to shake off
> their fundamental model of what a toolkit *is*.

A "new" toolkit would probably this without hesitation. The cause for
the "mental effort" is that we already have a toolkit with hundreds of
apps and libraries that use it. We need to have some level of
compatibility with it, or people are gonna be very pissed. 

Additionally doing such a redesign has a lot more risk. We know the
strenghts and weaknesses of the current gtk+. A large redesign may seem
right initially, but show up significant problems after a while, so such
a project would need a much longer development period where it takes
shape.

If I were to do something like that I'd keep gtk3 approximately as it
now takes shape (i.e. cleanup but mostly compatible). Then create a
completely new toolkit with a different name, based on the gtk stack
(i.e. cairo, glib, gio, pango, etc). This is kinda what clutter does, ,
although clutter is not really a full toolkit (no toplevel handling, no
file dialogs, no printing, no dnd, etc, etc).

I don't think its worth it though. Even when reusing the lower parts of
the stack we're talking many man-years of work, and I think the "linux
desktop" could spend that effort better on other things.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's a hate-fuelled flyboy romance novelist with acid for blood. She's a 
warm-hearted renegade bounty hunter with a flame-thrower. They fight crime!