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

[Matthew Brush]

On 13-11-12 03:48 PM, Lex Trotman wrote:
>> Why to switch to other toolkits?!
>> I not understand what don't good in GTK+.
>>
>> And also - why to keep GTK+ 2?
>> GTK+ 3 avilable in all distro, also in older distro,
>> it also work in Windows and also in Mac. this
>> because GTK+ 3 released before almost three years.
>>
>> Because many distros are more than 3 years old and still supported.  Geany
> has users (and developers) in commercial and academic environments which
> will often be constrained to older (but still supported) versions of Red
> Hat, Scientific Linux, Suse etc.
>
> Its fine for hobbyists to want to play with the latest, we only have one PC
> to change over, but institutions often have hundreds or thousands and have
> all sorts of specific software to ensure still works when they upgrade.
>

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.