Gconf or GSettings? - leading to a wider question

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Sat Jan 19 10:29:43 PST 2013


On Jan 19, 2013, at 9:16 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > Two different lines of though bring me to ask the same question.  Namely, why does subsurface use Gtk2 and not the newer version?
> 
> Even within the Linux world, gtk2 is much more portable than gtk3. I still have machines with older distributions that simply don't have gtk3 available.
> 
> When you then look at the windows and osx situation, its even more clear that gtk2 is the right choice for portability.

gtk3 is slowly showing up on the Mac (with LOTS of teething pains). Things are even worse on Windows.

> That said, gtk3 has better integration with cairo, and I looked at allowing people to build using it (while still also working with gtk2). However, the gtk people don't understand about compatibility, and it was much too painful to try to have both work. Not only does gtk3 have new interfaces, they also drop old ones even when they would seem to be easy to support with some compat layer.

Funny - I actually looked at building with gtk3 just a couple of weeks ago. And gave up as it created a complete mess in the sources...

> If you know gtk well enough that you know how to write things so that they work with both versions (without just duplicating coffee and having tons of ifdefs in the code) I think that would be reasonable.

I would definitely recommend duplicating the coffee, Linus...

> But quite frankly, subsurface isn't the only project that decided that gtk3 want worth it. I don't understand projects that cannot seem to realize that compatibility is one of the absolute primary goals. Gtk3 screwed the pooch on that. Even gtk2 has several cases of " we added a new interface, and then we removed the old one".
> 
> Christ, what a pain. I would be almost more supportive of trying to move to something else entirely, based on the silly compatibility problems we've had with gtk. I don't know if there is anything better, though. 

I am very tempted by Qt. It's cross platform support is much better. We have a few more experienced Qt people around.

But then again, it brings us C++…

/D

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