Re: Bug 687752 - work with theme authors

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

On 11/11/2012 10:17 AM, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> GTK 3 at this point really is just the GNOME toolkit. There is absolutely zero
> involvement from anyone else. Neither XFCE nor LXDE nor Windows or OS X
> developers take any interest in pushing the toolkit forward - apart from
> occasional bug reports and patches. All features are prototyped, coded and
> maintained by GNOME developers. So in its current state I would call GTK a part
> of GNOME. It's worth pointing out that this was basically the same situation
> with GTK 2.

My comments have nothing to do with themes, but more to do with GTK
fulfilling my needs as a GTK app developer (not a Gnome developer), and
a response to the idea that GTK is the Gnome ToolKit now.

GTK2 had a workable Windows port at least, which I did use.  And on OS X
at least there was X11.  And it could be ported with minimal effort to
most modern Unix systems with an X server.  I understand the lack of
contributions to drive GTK forward on these fronts, and that is
unfortunate, but certainly not the fault of the core developers.  Even
more unfortunate, though, is that because of the tightening of coupling
between GTK and Gnome, you're heading towards dropping support non-Linux
systems entirely in GTK.  And even on linux, Gnome itself (the
perception is GTK is being drug along too), is being coupled closely to
components like systemd, udev, and other things which are nice, but
desktop distro-specific (Fedora mainly).  An embedded linux board
running some minimal distro wouldn't have those.  And I think this
integration is partly what is causing push-back by the other distro
makers and users.  If, for example, a light-weight rescue distro wants
to have a widget toolkit on which to make apps, what do you recommend?
Part of what made GTK2 so wonderful is that it was easy to use PyGTK and
hack together a light-weight, standalone app that did something useful.

I'm only a casual developer, and I love using GTK (2), because it is
just portable enough for my needs.  Much of what I would do in the
future I could see targeting small pseudo-embedded computers.  Say ARM
with a touch screen (no I don't want to run android), perhaps running
only an X server, with no udev, no systemd, and a single app.  GTK3,
with support for touch and multitouch would seem to be a good candidate
for targeting a GUI to such an environment, if it were light and
platform-independent like GTK2 (read: not tied to Gnome).  I don't need
or wnt Gnome's many layers.  And if GTK3 can't fill my needs, that's
okay; there are options, though none as nice as GTK's api.