Gtk3 for Xfce 4.12?

[Landry Breuil]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Nick Schermer <nick at xfce.org> wrote:
> Devs,
>
> Now 4.10 is out in the wild, it is time to look at the 4.12 roadmap and a
> part of that discussion is whether we want to port Xfce to gtk3.
>
> The API (or lack of it) is not a problem I guess, since I think most of code
> compiles with deprecations disabled.
>
> Theming? Not really my thing but I guess a couple of people can tell which
> version of 3.x we require for good theming (read: equal to gtk2). Is this
> even possible?
>
> Plugins: porting will be a lot of work in the core modules, not too much for
> panel plugins, but this this needs to be done.

Since theming changed a lot with Gtk3, that might affect a lot plugins
who like to use GtkRc (or other hacks) to set their own colors/style
for progressbars and such.. dunno if that'd still work with Gtk3.
GtkRc still seems to be in Gtk3, but marked as deprecated.

And lots of plugins are totally unmaintained atm, but they still
"work", are packaged by distributors, and hence probably used by
users.. Does porting the panel to Gtk3 would mean effectively dropping
support for those, or the panel could still load them (besides
look/theming issues..) ?

The "Xfce experience" is not only the core itself, but also the
ecosystem around it and the goodies/panel plugins are a big part of it
(and deserves attention/time too - we clearly lack contributors here)

Other than that, i see no roadblocks for Gtk3, but not necessarly a
urgent need for it. There's still room for polishing (thunar sidebar
pane, thunar desktop?, volman support for !linux, a renewed icon
theme, etc..) in Xfce itself to consider, whereas "porting to Gtk3"
doesnt bring improvements itself. But i totally agree it'll have to be
done someday :)

Landry