Gtk3 for Xfce 4.12?

[Nick Schermer]

On 2012-05-03 08:21, Andrzej wrote:
> On 03/05/12 14:54, Stephan Arts wrote:
>> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 7:42 AM, Mark 
>> Trompell<mark at foresightlinux.org>  wrote:
>>>> Just picking Webkit as example, because it
>>>> is a pretty prominent one, but there are more examples to find.
>>>
>>> Before someone says (not without evidence) that xfce isn't relying 
>>> on
>>> webkit. We do for example rely on libwnck, which doesn't in its 
>>> latest
>>> releases support gtk2 anymore. So we're either forced to fork (xfce
>>> did that for libwnck in the past), to stay with old dependancies or 
>>> to
>>> move on to gtk3. Forking is given the manpower of the project not 
>>> what
>>> we should aim for.
>>
>> I think you have just hit the sore-spot. One of our dependencies has
>> already stopped supporting gtk-2, this means the troubles have 
>> already
>> begun.
>
> This, plus any new frameworks/libraries we may want to use are likely
> to be Gtk3-only. I fully agree with this part, and I think this is 
> the
> single biggest, if not the only, reason for doing the port.

Libwnck is a dead-slow project, because there is nothing new to add.

All other dependencies are linked over dbus so we stay in sync with 
them as long they don't link gio to gtk3. VTE is a non-core dep that is 
not supported anymore, but nobody is preventing me from porting terminal 
to gtk3 *_*.

> As for distributing Gtk2 in distributions - sure, that's a nuisance
> but Gtk2 isn't going away for at least as long as it was in use - too
> many obscure, unmaintained applications out there.

True, we can safely rely on gtk2 for at least 5 years. The question is 
isn't it wiser to port now that to wait 1 or 2 Xfce releases... If we 
stick with gtk (not a fan of switching toolkits, that's just plain 
stupid to do) it is inevitable anyhow.

> Overall, I'm for porting, and preferably doing it quickly. In the
> future we might be forced to do releases more often, maybe even to
> synchronize them with Gtk releases, but if we stay with Gtk2 we will
> soon drop to a second-class DE.

I doubt gtk3 will be more broken what we've seen in gtk2, so we can 
stick with 1 year releases and maybe push a few fixes in stable branches 
for compatibility probems. Nothing that really worries me.

Nick