[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: MATE Desktop Environment in Debian



On Sun, 22 Jul 2012 15:34:01 +0200
Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 11:08:32AM +0200, Oz Nahum Tiram wrote:
> > There is also enough murmur and frustration about the lack of feedback
> > acceptance from from GNOME developers. Personally, I feel the
> > applications in GNOME are dumbed versions of their counterparts in
> > GNOME2 only re-written in GTK3. This is not usable to me.
> 
> That may only be true when considering complete rewrites. Porting an
> application from Gtk2 to Gtk3 does not at all require that many changes
> that you'd need to do a rewrite. (Basically they took that opportunity
> to drop old deprecated APIs[1].)

I disagree. I have a number of upstream projects which started with
early versions of GTK2 which I ported to more recent versions and in
which I then implemented support for the DISABLE_DEPRECATED macros of
glib2.0 and gtk+2.0 such that the current versions of these packages in
unstable build fine against the current gtk+-2.0 with
DISABLE_DEPRECATED set - yet none of these will build against gtk+3.0.

Some of my upstreams would have to be complete rewrites to port to
gtk3, at which point I start considering if it would be easier to
rewrite for something other than gtk or abandon the upstream.

> [1] And then they went and added new deprecations in Gtk3 along the way.
>     Meh.

Not so meh. When gtk+2.0 finally moves into oldlibs, my upstream
projects may have to be removed as the amount of work required to move
to gtk+3.0 from gtk+2.0 with DISABLE_DEPRECATED is larger than the
amount of work to set DISABLE_DEPRECATED on gtk+2.0 in the first place.
That wasn't in the plan. It took months to make the most recent
transition. I wouldn't mind so much if porting to gtk3 added some
functionality to my apps, it doesn't, it just makes it harder to let my
apps behave as they should.

Gtk2 was a step forward from gtk1. Gtk3 is a failure IMHO. Unless third
party apps buy into the entire shell monoculture (via a rewrite), gtk3
makes it all but impossible to migrate. Gtk3 is an aggressive move to
strip out apps which don't fit the GNOME3 model, a model which I find
abhorrent and completely unsuited to how I want my projects to behave.

What I can't reimplement in Qt4 (not KDE, Qt) will simply be abandoned,
thanks to Gtk3. It augers badly for XFCE and LXDE too as gtk3 makes life
difficult for them too, including adding more bloat for no increased
functionality when a lack of bloat is the one thing which sets XFCE and
LXDE apart from GNOME.

http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2012-May/029843.html

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

Attachment: pgpdM9SWMazOh.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: