Re: Who wants to take over gtk-vector-screenshot?
On Sat, 08 Aug 2020 at 12:11:05 +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> The hack involved a gtk3 module, and the screenshot taking program
> actually instructs the real program to generate the SVG, using
> Gtk/Gdk’s uniform interface for drawing on the screen and in PDF files.
>
> The hack is a bit hairy (you are running code in arbitrary programs),
> and can crash (see #968031).
GTK upstream are increasingly discouraging arbitrary GTK modules, exactly
because injecting code like that is running code in arbitrary programs,
which is hairy and can crash. The development branch, GTK 4 (src:gtk+4.0
in experimental, which I'm trying to update to its latest version)
has more limited-scope extension-point interfaces for input methods,
media player backends (GStreamer or some substitute) and printing (CUPS
or some substitute), but no longer has a general-purpose interface for
random extensions with no particular scope.
However, both GTK 3 and 4 do now have "the GTK inspector", an
integrated debugging tool (run a GTK program with environment variable
GTK_DEBUG=interactive to try it out). Reconstructing the UI as SVG seems
like the sort of thing that could usefully become part of the inspector -
that would set appropriate expectations about how strongly it is supported
("it's a debugging tool, if it breaks please send patches" rather than
"this is something to use in production").
> Or, maybe even better: Is there someone here who is also involved with
> gtk upstream? Because while I think the feature is great, the
> implementation is still a bit of a hack, and to make this really usable
> it would probably have to be a built-in feature of gtk.
I suspect that (again, probably as part of the inspector) would be the
best future for this. Sorry, I don't have the time available to do more
with GTK upstream than I am already doing, but perhaps someone else in
the GTK/GNOME team is interested?
The GTK/GNOME teams both in Debian and upstream are short of resources
(like any other team dealing with important packages...) so there won't
necessarily be anyone with the bandwidth to push this forward.
https://discourse.gnome.org/c/platform/5 or
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues would be the place to send
feature requests.
smcv
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