Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

[flo.xfce at gmx-topmail.de]

I am not so worried. Looking at the roadmap there is probably one more
year until 4.0 gets released, and after that we have two more years to
watch what happens. Gtk2 is still supported (for 5 years now since Gtk3
came out?) - it won't be much different for the new versions.
Although the Gtk devs develop their software mostly with Gnome's goals
in mind they know that a desktop that pleases its users uses more
software than just their products. For the sake of interoperability and
and somewhat consistent UX the breakage will be limited. To be fair -
look at the porting efforts for Gtk3 currently underway. There are a few
tricky parts but mostly small simple changes. It's not that
functionality is removed, it's just hidden. So I am pretty confident
that working with Gtk's new release schedule will be quite possible.
Also, the fact that porting should be done only after 2 years and not
before frees up time for other things to work on in Xfce instead of
keepings its dependencies up-to-date.

On 07/31/16 10:06, OmegaPhil wrote:
> On 31/07/16 07:33, Liviu Andronic wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 10:50 PM, Ali Abdallah <aliovx at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Maybe you have heard already about Gtk 4.0 plan and versioning convention.
>>> Xfce depends on Gtk, and whatever the gtk guys do to the toolkit will have a
>>> big impact on xfce. The versioning convention by itself it not a big deal (a
>>> part that it has no sense at all to change the versioning convention that
>>> everybody is able to interpret), what worries me more is the rapid API/ABI
>>> breakages rate. It is true that Xfce port to Gtk3 did not happen yet, but I
>>> think it is sound to discuss the gtk future plans here, and to share
>>> opinions.
>>>
>>> My overall feeling these days is that I don't trust those guys anymore, and
>>> I fell myself demotivated to write gtk code that the gtk devs will make
>>> obsolete in a second, with continuous breakage even between minor
>>> releases...
>>>
>> EFL has been suggested in the past by some Xfce devels as an
>> alternative to Gtk, but the consensus seemed to be that 'porting' to
>> EFL really implied a rewrite of the desktop.
> 
> Apparently EFL is a monstrosity:
> https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
> 
> 
> 
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