[Geany-Devel] Don't pop-up messages/steal focus when in terminal

[Matthew Brush]

On 13-04-20 09:52 AM, Nick Treleaven wrote:
> On 20/04/2013 16:06, Matthew Brush wrote:
>> On 13-04-20 05:59 AM, Harold Aling wrote:
>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 1:40 AM, Lex Trotman <elextr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Agree with Thomas, we should go to 2.24 for windows since we supply the
>>>> bundle, Linux doesn't need to go so far, for eg what GTK did the
>>>> current red
>>>> hat and suse enterprise versions release with, expect 2.18 or 2.20.
>>>
>>> I might be stepping completely out of line with this remark: Do people
>>> with dusty old GTK's use bleeding edge Geany?
>>
>> It is rumored that some percentage (remember 0 is a percent :) of users
>> are apparently stuck on ancient enterprise distros at work, need to use
>> the latest bleeding edge Geany at all times, and are able install it but
>> not GTK+ from source into $HOME. Or so the story goes :)
>
> I imagine building newer GTK/GLib from source with only old dependencies
> would be a pain in the arse, having to grab and build all the newer
> dependencies too. It's also a pain for most users to install and manage
> multiple versions of libraries. Geany is actually very easy to build as
> it only requires Gtk/GLib.
>

It is a pain, but I'm more skeptical about what percentage of users are 
in this situation. Just thinking about the specific criteria you'd have 
to meet to be in this minority of users:

* Running old but still supported enterprise distro
* No ability/access to install a separate system GTK+
* Aren't satisfied with the Geany in the repos
* Need to run the absolute latest Geany from release or Git
* Aren't willing to compile/install GTK+ stack into $HOME but are for 
Geany, but not for most other popular GTK+ software which requires newer 
GTK+.

Or, in the case of Windows:

* Need to run absolute latest Geany from release or Git
* Required to have a specific old system-wide GTK+
* Unable to install a newer GTK+ specifically for Geany or
* Unwilling to used the bundled GTK+ that comes with Geany
* Not using lots of other GTK+ software that requires newer GTK+

So for some possibly insignificant number of Geany users (possibly even 
approaching 0 users), who still technically have a path to use latest 
Geany, albeit with some hassle (building GTK stack), we 
(contributors/developers) have to:

* Quadruple check every GTK+ function we call, referring to out of date 
documentation in some cases, to ensure we don't use API from the last 4 
years or
* Ensure all new code using API from the last 4 years is #if'd-out so 
that they work with both latest and ancient GTK+.
* Maintain more stuff in the gtkcompat.h header to fake out a bunch of 
core and plugin code so we can also build against latest GTK+.
* Have a separate old GTK+ on our dev. machines besides modern ones to 
test all changes against (although I don't do this personally).

IMO, the benefits to current and potential contributors and users of 
updating to a relatively modern min. GTK+ 2 version outweighs the 
negatives to some unknown small percentage of users.

Even Puppy Linux has had GTK+ 2.24 for the last two releases[1].

</rant>

Cheers,
Matthew Brush

[1] http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy