New minimum requirement of GTK+2/GLIB for Xarchiver

Jani Monoses jani.monoses at gmail.com
Fri Aug 4 18:27:20 CEST 2006


> 
> A few things, first there is time.
> Then there might be some things they patched agains gtk+ 2.x, work
> they need to redo if they upgrade to another version, and this
> requires time.

This is theory, but I am not sure how many general purpose distros are
in this situation. Actually it is less maintenance to use a new release
as it has better chances of getting bugfixed by upstream.
So besides specific ones like the OS for the nokia770 I don't know
if 2.6 is still used. I just learned that OLPC is going with 2.10 too.

So people on legacy distros remain. How many of them do you think update
to Xfce 4.4 but the rest of the system stays legacy?

> 
> Dependencies, performance, memory usage. All these things do not
> automagicly improve upstream. And, when you look at a binary
> distribution like debian. Every package using gtk+ needs to be rebuild
> and tested. Debian sarge supplies Gtk+-2.6, and that won't change (for
> good reasons), you have testing/unstable for that. But until a new
> debian version is released, users of the 'stable' release stick to
> version 2.6.

And since it's the stable debian it is likely that Xfce 4.4 won't ever
be in it.

FWIW going with Gtk 2.6 was decided last year when 2.10 was not yet out,
the rationale being 'use the previous stable release'.

I don't care much either way, just wanted to point out that precious
developer time can be wasted to assure some theoretical portability at
the expense of getting things done with better APIs which are used by
the majority of users anyway.

Jani




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