[Geany-devel] Question about GTK+ version used

[Enrico Tröger]

On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 04:44:06 -0700, Matthew wrote:

>On 11-10-01 03:05 AM, Enrico Tröger wrote:
>> On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 01:21:59 -0700, Matthew wrote:
>
>>> So I was just curious *specifically* what distro(s) and version(s)
>>> sets the oldest version of GTK+ that Geany should support?
>>
>> I don't know anything as specific as you probably want to hear,
>> sadly. It's just that it raises up from time to time when users tell
>> on what old systems they compile Geany.
>>
>
>It seems to me like this group of users would be very small and
>require that they are:
>   - Enterprise/LTS users running a GUI
>   - And who are willing to install unsupported software.
>   - And whos distro doesn't backport newer libraries.
>   - And who are developers, can compile Geany but can't compile GTK+.
>   - And who are not satisfied with existing supported Geany packages.
>
>I would just be curious to know how many (or what percentage of) users 
>fall into this group.

I can't tell any discrete numbers, it's just here and then users tell
about this. But most probably the amount of users using such old
systems is way less than those who use much newer systems with e.g.
GTK3.


>Just one example would be the GtkBuilder stuff which would not really
>be "cool", but it would make it easier to unglue some of the business
>logic from the GUI stuff and make fixing/developing Geany easier.
>Another example could be the use of GtkInfoBar, whether and where it
>might be useful is another discussion.
>
>What's more, some existing #if'd code could be fixed to be used
>proper, again making Geany easier to fix/maintain (assuming there's
>some existing #if'd code blocks...I think I saw some).
>
>Another reason, is to make it easier for people to help get Geany able 
>to build with GTK+ 3 eventually, which probably many more users will 
>care about in the somewhat near future than supporting extremely old 
>versions of GTK+ 2.  It would also help to attract new developers to 
>Geany if they didn't have to "go back in time" to see what was the way 
>to do GTK+ things 4+ years ago.  No one likes writing deprecated
>code :)

Ok, when talking about going towards GTK3 and maybe even GtkInfoBar, it
obviously makes sense to bump the GTK requirements and that is
completely reasonable.
I just don't like 'let's bump just because it's newer then'. If there
is a good reason, it's completely ok. If not, we would just annoy users
sticked to an older system.


Regards,
Enrico

-- 
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