Re: GTK and OSX: a call to sanity

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le mardi 06 septembre 2011 à 16:34 -0700, John Ralls a écrit :
> I'm not going to respond to most of that.
I think you shouldn't take Emmanuele's tone so bad. ;-)
He's always very direct, but his point is right, and his suggestions are
actually the acknowledgment that your work is worth being part of core
GTK - they are meant to help you. I'm going to try telling things in a
slightly nicer fashion...

> Suffice it to say that building gtk-osx is largely automated, and
> there are well-tested instructions at
> http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/gtk-osx/wiki/Build
That's not the question. This page should be on live.gnome.org, because
that's where we assume docs are, and people with an account there can
give a hand.

> I didn't get commit privs at Gnome.org until just under a year ago, 18
> months after I took over from Richard. I still don't have privs on any
> of the other facilities except Bugzilla, and there only because I'm a
> Gnucash Dev. (That turns out to be sufficient for almost everything.)
Maybe it took some time, but in my experience getting privileges is very
fast. Anyway, now you have everything you need to work on gnome.org,
don't you?

>  Gtk-OSX needs its own mailing list because it provides jhbuild
> modules for over 100 separate projects, not all of which are even
> Gnome. It's not feasible for me to monitor all of them for support,
> nor is it reasonable for users of my build scripts to have to figure
> out which one to use for any particular problem.
So maybe you need a separate mailing list for helping building these
programs, but it could live on gnome.org. For GTK+ development itself ,
the present list is the natural place, like Emmanuele said.

> It's not a fork of Gtk+ (yet, though on days like this one I get
> really tempted). I actually revived the gtk-osx project on SF; the
> previous version was an actual fork of Gtk1.
So let's improve things a step more, and completely merge the project.
Sounds like the natural end of the story. :-)

> As I explained earlier, the changes *are* patches, they *are* attached
> to bugs in Bugzilla, and Kris Reitveld *has* promised to review them.
> When he has had time to do so and they have been polished to his high
> standards, they will be committed into mainline.
If you need Kris to review your patches before committing them to
mainline, then the usual way is to have a branch in the GTK git
repository, and rebase it into master when it's accepted. That's much
easier for everybody, much better than putting them on a different repo.

> In the meantime they're quite useful for a number of projects who want
> a better Mac experience for their users than the Gtk core devs seem
> motivated to provide.
*This* is a different issue. If reviewers cannot keep up with your
patches, and you need to release tarballs that include code not in
mainline, that means gtk-osx isn't yet fully merged into GTK. But,
disregarding the fact that it would probably be good that everything
goes to mainline in time, putting your gtk-osx special branch on in the
GTK repository instead of SF would be a good thing.


I hope that was helpful...