Is there anything I should know to replace GnomeDruid with GtkAssistant?

[Tao Wang]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 12:13 AM, Geert Janssens
<janssens-geert at telenet.be>wrote:

> On Thursday 10 June 2010, Tao Wang wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm working on Bug 596254, Replace deprecated GnomeDruid/libglade with
> > GtkAssistant/GtkBuilder. I have tried on
> > src/gnome-utils/druid-gconf-setup.c, it looks ok.
> >
> > We should increase version of the dependent gtk+ from 2.10 to 2.12 to do
> >  the replacing. Because libglade doesn't support any new widget after
> 2.10,
> >  only GtkBuilder, which is introduced since 2.12, support it. And the
> >  libglade is deprecated too, we should replace libglade with GtkBuilder
> >  sooner or later, so the dependent gtk+ version will eventually reach
> 2.12
> >  anyway. Based on the recent updated wiki,
> >  http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Dependencies, almost all major platforms
> >  support 2.16 or higher, so it should be safe to depend on gtk+ 2.12.
> >
> Unfortunately no. I had asked a similar question some time ago. The answer
> I
> got was that we wish to support Redhat EL5, which only ships with gtk+
> 2.10.
> That's the reason I didn't start porting the dialogs myself. I made a
> request
> in Redhat's bugzilla to ship 2.12 for RHEL5
> (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=558788), but there's no
> response
> so far.
>
> If it stands that we wish to support RHEL5 (and hence it's downstream
> distro's
> Centos 5 and Scientific linux 5) we can't introduce the gtkassistant based
> dialogs now.
>
> As to my preference, I'd like to keep the RHEL5 support in.
>
> Geert
>

Thank you to remind me about RHEL 5, I didn't realize we still support it.
In most case, they just ignore the request of package update, since they
will keep the base stable for the entire support time. There are only rare
cases they update the packages version in the follows updates.

I did a research on distrowatch.com, I checked top 100 Linux/Unix distros,
including *BSD and *Solaris.

86 platforms support gtk+ 2.12 or higher;
7 platforms didn't support (or just simple X) desktop environment;
Only 7 platforms didn't support gtk+ 2.12, they are:
====
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 (2.10.4)
CentOS 5.5 (2.10.4)
Scientific 5.5 (2.10.4)
Yellow Dog (2.10.4)
----
LinuxXP (2.10.8)
Wolvix (2.10.13)
----
Solaris (2.4.0)
====

Although Solaris only provide gtk+2.4.0, the OpenSolaris provide gtk+
2.14.5.

Based on the numbers, I propose that we should stop supporting RHEL 5, which
stop us move to Gtk 3. We have to use deprecated packages(libgnomeui,
libglade, etc.) for a long time, EOL of RHEL 5 is 2014.

I understand that we should provide as more platform as we can, however, it
doesn't mean we should support all platforms we found. Depend on gtk+ 2.12,
we still support almost all major platforms.

-- 
Regards

Tao Wang