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

[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.

Best regards.