Re: cross-platformness (was: GTK + Clutter next step(s))

[Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org>]

> GTK+ 3 actually does work reasonably well on OS X.
>
> Whether or not you are concerned about other backends is a discussion that has been had before -- is GTK+ a cross-platform toolkit or should other backends not hold the X11 part from progressing? Perhaps it is time that a real decision is made here or that we set up an explicit matrix with features that are supported or not supported on the different platforms.
>
I don't think we need a matrix of supported features - at least not
for GTK. All features should be supported on all platforms. Or for
features that are specific to one platform (like GtkSocket and
GtkPlug), they should be clearly marked as such.
That of course also means that when designing features, we need to
make sure we design them in a way that is supportable on all platforms
we want to run on.

But I still don't think we should limit ourselves by platforms that
aren't "actively developed". I'd define "actively developed" as
something like "have a person working at least half-time on that
platform and running usual applications as GTK applications on that
platform." So if we develop a new feature, we have people on the other
platforms writing the code for their ports in sync with the core
developer of that feature. I would also delay features if they weren't
ready on some platforms provided I knew they are in active
development. But it's a really sad situation if we have to block on
unsupported ports that nobody even compiles.

That said, if I were to develop cogl support today, I definitely
wouldn't want to push it onto everyone as mandatory without any real
actual benefits. I'm way too excited about people actually working on
the Windows and OS X ports. So I do expect any work on cogl
integration to live on a branch or have an --enable-cogl configure
switch for the time being.

Benjamin