Re: Bug 687752 - work with theme authors

[Magnus Hjorth <magnus i hjorth gmail com>]

Hi list,

Stepping in a bit late into the discussion here...


On 11/11/2012 06:17 PM, 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.

There is a (fairly large I think) group of silent users of GTK regarding 
it just as a base library providing infrastructure for their 
application, and I don't see why there should be anything wrong with 
that. How many people using GLIBC actively participate in its 
development? (OK that's an extreme example but you get my point)

In my case, I wrote my application (mhwaveedit) 10 years ago while still 
a student, now I no longer have much time to spend on it (perhaps a few 
hours per month on average). I try to fix bugs and keep it relevant on 
the average Linux desktop. Originally I wrote it for GTK+ 1.2, then I 
ported it over to GTK 2. It remains to be seen if it gets ported to GTK3 
sometime in the future.

I really liked how GTK2 maintained backward compatibility, and how still 
gradually things got more integrated like print dialogs etc so the 
difference between just-GTK and GNOME apps became smaller and smaller 
without losing portabillity or forcing stuff on you.

I guess it boils down to whether you regard GTK as a library of its own 
providing an API to stand-alone application developers, or as more of a 
module that evolves together with the GNOME desktop. GTK2 served both 
purposes well, but it sounds from this discussion GTK3 will not.

Of course as active developers you have the right to choose whatever 
direction you want for GTK. But I think you are raising the bar for 
developing independent apps for GTK and you will get less users choosing 
it as a result. You may simply not care about that, which is fine, but 
good to know...



>  Backwards compatibility is a huge time sink.

It's a time sink for you, but a huge time saver for everyone downstream.


Regards,
Magnus