[Geany-Devel] Gtk2 vs Gtk3 (was. Re: A direction for Geany)

Matthew Brush mbrush at xxxxx
Tue Nov 12 23:27:20 UTC 2013


On 13-11-12 03:06 PM, Steven Blatnick wrote:
> I'm being a bit off topic, but one problem I have with having both Gtk2
> and Gtk3 apps is that there have been settings and theme discrepancies.
> For example, I use Linux Mint MATE, and there have been some problems
> with bookmarks being in sync between the file open dialog in Gtk2 apps
> vs Gtk3 apps.  Plus, if I don't use a theme that is available in both
> versions of Gtk, then I end up with foreign looking apps in my
> environment, almost like I'm port forwarding X and getting things
> theme-less.  Even geany hasn't been flawless in this Gnome Civil War,
> with the default external file browser being nautilus, where my system
> uses the nearly identical caja, although I changed the setting in geany
> of course.
>

Fair enough, but none of this is Geany's problem, it's more like your 
distro isn't well-configured and the GTK+ team did a crap job 
maintaining overall compatibility between major releases even at the 
user level.

Unless we're going to switch toolkits or someone is volunteering to 
maintain a fork, there's really no logical reason to avoid the 
inevitable, scratching and clawing at the past hoping some generous 
RedHat developers are going to forever maintain dead versions, or 
they'll change their minds and revert back to good old days or something.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush


> On 11/12/2013 03:23 PM, Matthew Brush wrote:
>> On 13-11-12 09:47 AM, Frank Lanitz wrote:
>>> Am 11.11.2013 10:31, schrieb Matthew Brush:
>>>> The other way we could go is to just strive to be a proper, modern GTK+
>>>> application. By this I mean using stuff like GtkApplication,
>>>> GtkApplicationWindow, GSettings, etc. The GTK+ stack has lots of cool
>>>> stuff to make doing applications easier/better that we don't use
>>>> because
>>>> of the ever-present restriction about needing to be able to support LTS
>>>> distros with old GTK2 and not wanting to "GObjectify" and/or make large
>>>> changes to the code.
>>>
>>> As mentioned in another mail already, we got a lot of users requesting
>>> to still support Gtk2 as they don't want to change to some Gtk3-based
>>> desktop. These users will decrease with time for sure and once Xfce 4.12
>>> is ready for Gtk3 hopefully will disappear, but currently it looks a bit
>>> like this will be happen when GNU/Hurd final is released.  Until this
>>> eternity, we need to find a way for users not using Gtk3 in favor of
>>> Gtk2 -- even I know it's a pain in the back.
>>>
>>
>> It would be a less painful if we could at least use the current/last
>> supported GTK+2 version at least (2.24-ish). Supporting back some half
>> a decade of GTK+2 versions when already the most recent version is
>> deprecated/dead and shouldn't really be used for any new code is kind
>> of crazy.
>>
>> I'm curious if you asked the users complaining about not wanting to
>> "switch to a Gtk3-based desktop" whether they actually have libgtk3
>> installed anyway? For example I use XFCE 4.10, which isn't technically
>> a Gtk3-based desktop environment, and I'm happily using Gtk2 and 3
>> apps side-by-side without any issues. Is it possible the users were
>> just expressing more GNOME-hate and directing it GTK3 instead or you
>> think they really are using super old desktop environments before Gtk3
>> started being widely distributed?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Matthew Brush
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