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

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 5:43 AM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> Hello Paul,
>
> 2010/8/30 Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>:
>>> 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,
>
> This is a resources issue, most of the existing developers are focused
> on Linux, and they have no resources/time to focus on Windows
> development.
> I have contributed several improvements to improve the Windows support
> and I have felt more than welcome to do so.

I wasn't disputing the resource issue.

But there are (at least) two approaches to the resource issue. One is
to say "well, we don't have enough (or the right) person-hours to
implement this for all backends, but we will go ahead and do it
anyway; the backends will catch up when someone does the work there".
Another would be to say "well, we don't have enough (or the right)
person-hours to implement this for all backends, and because its going
to break/change the semantics/stop compilation on some of them, and
because GTK is trying to be a cross-platform toolkit, we won't
actually push this change until we can figure out how to get it in
place for all the backends".

Now there is clearly a perfectly good rationale for choosing the first
approach - most GTK developers and most GTK users are on X11
platforms, and yes, viewed from that perspective, it doesn't make
sense to hold up the development of GTK because of a lack of human
resources for other backends.

But then if that is the decision, it also doesn't make sense to claim
that the sense of "other backends don't really count" is so clearly
wrong. Let me give you a recent example, although I am wary of doing
so because I don't want to make it appear that I'm being critical of
the design decisions of process that was involved. There is work going
on for GTK+3 to add a GApplication object to Glib and probably a
GtkApplication object to GTK. I've had quite a few discussions on IRC
about what this might need to look like to be useful on OS X, and I
think that because of this, the result will not be too hard to "port"
to OS X (and probably Windows too). But ... the clearly overriding
goal for this object has been to provide some functionality for a
GNOME/X11 platform, functionality that is already present on OS X and
Windows c/o the OS. So although other platforms are loosely taken into
account by the design process of this potentially central part of
Glib/GTK, the actual reality is that it will provide almost no
functionality for apps on other platforms, and will instead be a way
to get some specific (very useful) things done within the context of
GNOME and DBus. To stress again, there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. I
don't have any disagreement with the way things have happened, but I
also know that it reinforces *my* personal feeling that for most of
the core GTK development team, GTK is an X11/GNOME toolkit that
happens to run on other platfoms to some extent, rather than a
cross-platform toolkit that happens to have some specific support for
GNOME. Its therefore no suprise that John and perhaps some others
should feel a little "edge-dweller-ish" in their efforts to get GTK
fully implemented on OS X.

> So yeah, I totally support Matthias here, if you want a better
> situation, feel free to JFDI.

Everytime I've needed something in the OS X backend, I've had to JFDI
and have. I've made numerous improvements to the OS X backend, and
will continue to do so on as-needed basis because I already have a
full time job as a developer of an app that is actually *using* GTK.