Re: Gtk-OSX (was: Website proposal for usability)

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Matthias Clasen
<matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 12:35 AM, John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us> wrote:
>
>> You might not like the warnings about the quality of Gtk+ Quartz, but when I wrote them a year ago, no one had touched the quartz backend for 8 months. Since then, one developer (Kristian Reitveld) has fixed many of the outstanding bugs, and some of the other Gtk devs have become a lot more receptive to minor patches... but the general attitude remains that it's OK to implement (or rewrite) features in Linux, and if it breaks Win32 and Quartz, oh well. There's a list of features that aren't yet implemented, or aren't implemented completely, at http://live.gnome.org/GTK%2B/OSX/.
>
> As long as the people working on GTK-OSX do it with a us-vs-them
> attitude (like you display here by talking about the GTK developers in
> third person), things are not going to change. If you start
> considering yourself part of the team and actively engage, things can
> and will change.

this is pretty obnoxious.

i don't know how tor manages to keep his temper with the windows port,
but the truth is as john stated it: the core GTK development team has
*consistently* demonstrated that its considered fine to implement
something/change something for the linux port with the expectation
that other backends will just follow along. i have lots of IRC quotes
to support this claim, quite apart from the history provided by git.
the people working on gtk-osx (which at this point is pretty much
kristian plus a few occasional patch providers) do not consider
*themselves* to be in an us-vs-them situation IMHO. instead, the
attitude consistently displayed on IRC and this channel supports a
view of the world in which the core parts of GTK are developed for the
linux/gnome platform and then the rest of the world might, at some
point, follow along. the very idea of trying to implement major new
functionality on all supported backends before its committed to git
(or certainly before its released) seems like an anathema to the
development process.

***which of course is fine***

as long as you then don't go and get upset when people whose major
focus is a backend other than the the linux/X11 one feel distinctly
edge-dweller-like when yet another change to GTK is done without much
consideration of their chosen platform.