On 13-11-13 04:12 AM, Frank Lanitz wrote:
Am 13.11.2013 11:22, schrieb Thomas Martitz:
Am 13.11.2013 01:21, schrieb Matthew Brush:
That's a fair[1] argument *if* those old distros aren't shipping GTK3 binaries/libraries (I can't say whether they are or not), otherwise it's a bogus point because then we're only talking about a very very small number of users who (all of these must apply, not just some):
- Use an old, nearly end-of-life enterprise distro
- Don't have admin rights or clout enough to get admins to install
newer versions of stuff
- Need to compile Geany from source, from the absolutely bleeding edge
head of Git, rather than using the version they're "supposed to" as available from their distro and supported by their IT personnel
- Refuse to take a few hours to compile newer GTK+ stack in $HOME
- Can't or don't want to run a virtual machine, bootstick or live
distro to get access to more modern software
Cheers, Matthew Brush
[1]: Well not completely fair, because they're making Geany development harder and holding back progress/improvements for the sake of having to use latest Geany releases instead of older, stable and supported versions, and even then still need to be able compile from source code and permissions to install development packages and such which I imagine are unlikely to be pre-installed for them by their sysadmins.
I'm *really really really* tired of this topic. This comes up every now and then, with the same bulled points over and over and with no outcome at all (we're still at 2.16 after a couple of discussions even though nobody explicitly says we need to be at this specific version).
Can't we just define a simple rule that's written out somewhere as to which GTK+ version to support. I don't mean a specific version number but a rule like "The one released X years/month ago" or "the version shipped in (enterprise) distro ABC" or "re-evaluated in a grand IRC meeting every Y month". This would mean implicit bumping of the minimum (by accepting patches that bump the minimum while observing the rule) as required. Then we don't have to have this tiresome argument over and over.
I like the idea.
My suggestion: We should finish work on 1.24 in near future and release it with 2.16 dependency. After this we can upgrade to 2.24 or whatever. Also during this progress we should really sit down and define a way how to define what we are going to support. -> Different thread.
+1
And we should also try/confirm ourselves some of the older distros we claim to want to support (as listed in your other message), to see if it's even possible or feasible to compile a latest Geany from source in these cases where the person isn't having the needed permissions to install packages (build tools, dev headers, etc) or touch stuff outside of $HOME.
I get the feeling a lot of people want to stick to gtk2 just because they fear change (or got burned by GNOME3, which uses gtk3) rather than being limited by technical reasons. Since the eventual change to gtk3 is inevitable, if there's no actual technical reason not to, we should probably get cracking on making it work as best as possible in Geany.
Cheers, Matthew Brush