Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

[Simon Steinbeiss]

Hi everyone,

I agree with (almost) everyone else that the Gtk development roadmap is a
good thing, as it makes our lives more plannable.

I've spoken to Gtk devs and some distro maintainers (on IRC) about this and
I think they're all acting in good faith and the roadmap is a response to
(and an acknowledgement of) the criticism coming from the wider community
regarding the toolkit's (lack of) stability since Gtk 3.0.

It also seems a bit delusional - no disrespect :) - to talk about porting
to another toolkit when we hardly manage to go to the next version of our
current choice due to lack of manpower/time.

Anyway, those are my 2 cents. Now stop the discussion and get back to
porting, everyone!! :D

Cheers
Simon




<flo.xfce at gmx-topmail.de> schrieb am So., 31. Juli 2016, 11:25:

> 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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> >
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