Hello Lex, hello Matthew,
Not sure GTK2 is worth too much effort though. GTK2 __will__ reduce in usage, especially when GTK4 is out later this year.
I agree to Matthew. You mentioned GTK4. Wouldn't that also be a reason to put the things in a common lib?
If I already have compatibility code called in a plugin then later I only need to change the compatibility lib/header and not the calling plugin. (and maybe this is just a "nice thought" because things diverge to much ;-) But I hope it's possible for the basic GUI things)
But I see that we all do not share the same opinion here and I do not want to end up being the only one supporting that approach and: A: be the only one contributing to a compatibility lib or B: be the only one who's using it in my plugin
Don't get me wrong, that's fine. But I will just wait with doing any GTK compatibility related stuff before we have a broad agreement in which direction we want to go with geany plugins regarding GTK2/3/4 compatibility and related stuff like VTE compatibility.
P.S.: I will leave the PR for the scope plugin open as a reminder. I want to port the scope plugin to GTK3 and there is at least one user who is interested in still having GTK2 support so I would like to support both at the end. I will definitely continue the work once the discussion has settled.
Greetings, Lars
On 25.02.2018 00:19, Matthew Brush wrote:
On 2018-02-23 02:52 PM, Lex Trotman wrote:
[...]
As I have been saying for a while, even for existing plugins I would make the GTK3 one a separate plugin [...]
This isn't a good idea because it causes way too much unnecessary maintenance burden. To save some #ifdef in a single file to smooth over the few differences between GTK+ 2 and 3, you're recommending to duplicate tens of thousands of lines of plugin code. This not only includes duplicating all of the C code, but also all of the build system code, translations, docs, etc.
With a #ifdefed plugin it takes effort to build it to support both
It's less effort to maintain a compatibility file/module with the few differences rather than having loads of duplicated code/infrastructure. It causes less burden on contributors and maintainers to edit a single code base with a few #ifdef stuff than to try and port changes between diverged plugins, or to edit one or the other, further diverging the forks.
To give an example, PR #697 ports Scope plugin from GTK+2 to GTK+3 and only touches +57,-26 lines in 7 files. That's roughly the number of lines which diverge between GTK+2 and GTK+3 for the plugin, of a total of around 12,000 total lines of code in 44 files (estimate of only C code using cloc utility). That's around 1% of code which differs between GTK+2 and GTK+3; IMO not enough to warrant a fork/duplicate.
and again to untangle it when GTK2 goes away, with two plugins you just delete one
Going the route of isolating the differences into a single compatibility header/module makes it even easier to drop GTK+2 support. For example in Geany core C code, we only have to delete the one gtkcompat.h header and GTK+2 support is gone. There is surely some other #ifdef stuff mixed into other parts of the code, but it's far less work to delete it later than the amount of work to maintain separate forks for GTK+2/3 when 99% of the code is in common.
Regards, Matthew Brush _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.geany.org https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel