Re: First experience with gtkmm

[Robert Pearce <rob bdt-home demon co uk>]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:39:15 -0400
"Michael Ferrier" <logopolis gmail com> wrote:

> 
> This was my first experience with an open source library, and I have to
> admit that I approached it with suspicions that the lack of a profit motive
> would result in inferior work.

That's such a Western Capitalist fallacy! The profit motive _never_
inspires good work, merely good-enough-to-mask-with-marketing work.
Open Source means it's a labour of love, which means the people doing
it actually have their hearts in it and will do good work.

> 
> 2) The first bug in gtkmm that I encountered was discouraging. This is the
> bug whereby a button cannot be pressed if it becomes active while the mouse
> is hovering over it:
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56070
> 
> The fact that this bug has been known and gone unfixed for about 8 years did
> not bode well.

There are some bugs that are just stupid, which get fixed really
quickly once they've been found. There are some which are too minor
to worry about, and get left. Then there's ones like that one. It's
basically a side-effect of a complex interaction between design
decisions. To fix it would need a significant re-write, and it's no
good changing the designs that lead to it because they're all done that
way for good reason. If you follow the discussion on the bug page
you'll see that (among the bugspam of "me too" and "why are you so
crap" comments) some people are seriously trying to figure out how to
fix it _properly_ so as not to break other stuff.