Future of Gnucash: Most productive platform (programming language and toolkit)?

[John Ralls]

On Dec 28, 2010, at 10:16 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> John Ralls (jralls at ceridwen.us) said: 
>> 
>> On Dec 28, 2010, at 9:06 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>> 
>>> John Ralls (jralls at ceridwen.us) said: 
>>>> 2. Gtk+-3.0 is supposed to be released next month. It removes a bunch of 
>>>> libraries which have been deprecated for several years upon which Gnucash
>>>> at present depends. All code that depends on those libraries needs to get
>>>> rewritten or we're not going to be in a bunch of distros by the end of 2011
>>> 
>>> ?
>>> 
>>> Gtk-2 isn't going to be removed from things like Fedora or RHEL anytime
>>> sooon. Much like Qt3 has yet to go away, it's likely to live on for a
>>> while, even if it's not the 'default' version of the toolkit.
>> 
>> WTF? I said exactly that _one_sentence_later_, suggesting that we'll need to have
>> two branches to support both the aggressive and conservative distros.
> 
> My point is that even the aggressive distributions are going to have gtk2
> around... it's not going to disappear there. (If you want, you could compare GnuCash's
> life on GNOME 1.x, which lasted 4 years after the release of GNOME 2.0.)


I think you need to spend some time with Ubuntu. They rather enjoy pushing the envelope, and they have a lot of mindshare. Also take a look at Jeff Warnica's message earlier in this thread where he complains of the difficulty of rounding up some of Gnucash's more obsolete dependencies. That's going to get worse.

I remember those 4 years. For the last two of them I had to hand build Gtk+-1 because Mandrake (now Mandriva) and Fink didn't support it. I'd call it Gnucash's time on life support rather than life on Gtk+-1. It would be a shame to repeat the (near death) experience.

Regards,
John Ralls