On Gtk3 (was:Re: Gnucash 2.5/6)

[John Ralls]

On Feb 12, 2013, at 2:41 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> On 08-02-13 16:09, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> writes:
>> 
>>> Forgot to mention: Gtk3 was indeed not on the agenda for 2.6. 2.6 is
>>> only meant to be *ready* to be migrated. This means getting rid of all
>>> the deprecated gtk symbols. Other than the register this is done. So
>>> the register rewrite is actually important for this goal, whether we
>>> use the GtkTreeView approach or the libgnome->cairo route.
>> Personnaly I'd rather see us move to Qt instead of Gtk3 when that
>> decision has to be made.  My reasoning is that I think the Gtk
>> developers have lost sight of their target audience, and as a result
>> keep removing features that are vital.  It's too much of a loose
>> firehose, and IMHO shouldn't be supported anymore.  Indeed, for my next
>> desktop re-install I plan to move away from a Gnome desktop and over to
>> XFCE..
> With Gtk3 the Gnome project has chosen a very different course which turns out to be very controversial as well. I have both seen people who absolutely love it and people who totally can't stand it. My point of view? I'm pretty neutral as I don't use it ;) I only used Gnome 2 for a while a long time ago, switched to kde then and never returned (this is not meant as a kde promo!).
> 
> It doesn't look to me they have lost sight of their target audience though. I rather think they have deliberately redefined their target audience. Inevitable that means some people that used to be targeted no longer are and hence don't like the new experience. I think many long-time knowledgeable computer users fall into that category. Less experienced users seem to like it a lot more.
> 
> I'm not here to defend the Gnome project's decisions though. I'm just saying whether gtk3 is a good thing or not is rather subjective.
> 

Don't confuse the toolkit with the Gnome Shell. Gtk+ itself hasn't changed that much, and many of the changes are about not wrapping services provided by other libraries -- like exposing a cairo surface to draw on rather than wrapping it with GtkCanvas,
or moving behaviors down to Gio (e.g. menus), I think so that the code can be shared with Clutter. Theming is now built in and accomplished with CSS, which should be a substantial stability improvement.

A much bigger problem is that since Tor Liliquist dropped out a couple of years ago, Win32 support hasn't kept up. There's no pre-built Gtk3 stack available on ftp.gnome.org, and there was a recent thread on gtk-devel-list from some Win32 users complaining that there were patches on bugzilla, widely adopted in the wild, that hadn't been applied.

But unless we can recruit some developers to take over where Christian left off, we're pretty much stuck with Gtk+.

Regards,
John Ralls