[Geany-Devel] A direction for Geany

[Dimitar Zhekov]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2013 19:19:05 -0800
Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:

> They definitively won't with all this completely counter-productive 
> hating on the library we use, holding back any type of useful progress 
> so you can vent your frustrations about something that is completely 
> outside of our control.

I don't like regressions, be it in Glade, Scintilla or GTK+, or any
other software. What is so strange about it? With too many of them, I
start considering something entirely different - isn't that normal?
The sad thing is, none of these are Geany's fault.

> Lots of users actually *want* Geany to move to Gtk3, for various reasons 
> such as using the same theme as the rest of their desktop (see what Gtk 
> version the top 3 Linux distros are using) or to get better/any Wayland 
> or support, or for various other reasons.

What stops them from using Geany with gtk+3?
What do you mean by "move to gtk+3" - drop gtk+2 ASAP? Why not let the
package maintainers for the different distributions decide whether to
build Geany for 2 or 3?

> So they shouldn't get proper support for their environment because you 
> hate change, refuse to acknowledge the inevitable and want to stick to a 
> deprecated version of our toolkit for a couple more years until it's 
> completely dead and gone and we are left with a big crusty hairball of 
> obsolete, unmaintainable source with more #ifdef's than actual lines of 
> code?

"hate change"? :) I'm considering KDE, which is a much bigger switch.
It would have been nice to have Geany for some more time, but I have
absolutely no idea how long gtk+2 will be supported.

As of the "inevitable" - every bad thing is inevitable, unless there
are enough people to oppose it. If there aren't, OK, free software is
all about choice.

> >> What does Scope do that it needs hard-core low-level speed for?
> >
> > The message loop and processing.
> >
> 
> So you profiled it and found that the message loop was too slow and that 
> your "processing" was a big bottleneck?

Do I really need to write a python variant of source_dispatch() and
on_editor_notify() to see that it'll slow everything down to a crawl?
C'mon. :) I program in python since some time now, have an idea about
it's speed, and one of the things I like about it is ctypes.

> >> Or the other plugins?
> >
> > Nothing. After the rectangular selection was rewritten in Scintilla
> > 2.x, it became so slow than even a shell script will not make any
> > difference.
> >
> 
> Scintilla openly accepts patches :)

I don't doubt about it. :) But it was _properly_ rewritten, and the
new rectangular selection shares a lot with the multiply selection.
Any rectangle larger than 10k lines (or 20k, if you have a high level
customer CPU) is slow by design, it's not a bug. After I had short
discussion with one of the developers, 2.xy was somewhat improved,
but it hit the design limit.

> FWIW, I'm not actually advocating that Gtk3 is better than Gtk2, I'm 
> advocating it doesn't change the fact that, for better or worse, Gtk3 is
> the current version of our toolkit library (for quite some time now) and
> complaining about it won't change anything.

Perhaps you missed my mail from Nov 14 in the "Gtk2 vs Gtk3" thread,
it contains exact percents of how current gtk+3 is, and how the gtk+
packages dropped overall big time.

But with all that said, you are right that such a discussion will lead
us nowhere. I'll read your answer, if there is any, and that'll be it.
Hopefully it'll contain some directions as to when Geany is going
gtk+3 only. The "Gtk2 vs Gtk3" percents may be a good starting point.

-- 
E-gards: Jimmy