Re: Status of GTK+ on Mac OS X?

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 8:18 PM, John Pye<john curioussymbols com> wrote:
> There's no PyGTK binary available anywhere for OS X. The only route seems to
> be to use 'jhbuild' and John Ralls' instructions from gtk-osx.sf.net. This
> seems unnecessarily difficult after the pleasant experience of getting
> started with Ubuntu and even Windows.

You can build GTK with the Quartz backend straight from a regular GTK
tarball if it gets ./configure'd correctly, which it is likely to do
by default. The issue with that is that in general you want the svn
version because of fixes and changes - things are still at the point
where some of the fixes are fairly important and when they appear you
probably want them immediately.

> More generally, what level of support for the OS X platform does the GTK+
> undertake to provide?

there is already enough support to run two large, very complex GTK
applications: GIMP & Ardour.

>Does the organisation have a plan to resolve the
> outstanding bugs and features in gtk-quartz?

there is no organisation working on this. there are very few people
working on this. at present, it is even proving difficult to get
patches accepted into GTK svn.

> Is there a consensus that support for OS X is valuable to the GTK+
> community, or are more people of the view that we can take it or leave it?

My interpretation is that its viewed as valuable but that most people
working on GTK development do not have mac access and/or have no time
or inclination to work on OS X themselves.

> Where does this leave GTK+ compared to other GUI toolkits that offer
> cross-platform support?

it works. it has issues. Qt is in a similar position, at least if you
want apps to be based mostly on Cocoa rather than Carbon.

> Why isn't the OS X port maintained on the official GNOME/GTK website?

it is all in SVN and is part of official releases. i am not sure what
makes you think otherwise.

What you should not expect, IMHO, is for there to be "a GTK/OSX
package". You should plan on distributing the GTK to your users as
part of the your own application bundle. If you're not planning to
create an application bundle, you're making a serious mistake, in my
opinion.

There are docs online, based partly on my initial experiments at this
with Ardour, and then merging richard hult's own efforts, on how to
bundle an app so that it works with an in-bundle version of GTK. This
may be trickier with PyGTK because you need to set up some fairly
specialized stuff before calling any GTK/GDK/Glib functions.