Re: Project rename to "GTK"

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 5:04 AM Emmanuele Bassi via gtk-devel-list
<gtk-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
> Hi all;
>
> tl;dr: GTK is GTK, not GTK+. The documentation has been updated, and the pkg-config file for the future 4.0 
> major release is now called "gtk4"
>
> over the years, we had discussions about removing the "+" from the project name. The "plus" was added to 
> "GTK" once it was moved out of the GIMP sources tree and the project gained utilities like GLib and the GTK 
> type system, in order to distinguish it from the previous, in-tree version. Very few people are aware of 
> this history, and it's kind of confusing from the perspective of both newcomers and even expert users; 
> people join the wrong IRC channel, the URLs on wikis are fairly ugly, etc.

Thanks for moving this along! It's good to see the GTK name finally
get less confusing and easier to talk about!

But to clarify the history, the "+" predates the point when GTK was
moved out of the GIMP tree. Every single version of GTK with publicly
released sources was called GTK+. As I understand it, Peter Mattis
added the + to mark a change from a very early version that was
structured more like Xt/Motif, to a version that had a fuller type
system with inheritance.

Owen