Views Expressed Over The Health Of GTK+

[elanthis]

Checkout Otte's response to Nekohayo's post (given in the subject since this form will not let me paste into it).

I can find nothing offensive, antagonistic, or hostile about Otte's posts there. As a primary GTK+ maintainer, he said it's not his priority, and did so without any rudeness, in any of the several comments of his on that page. That's it.

[ninez]

The theme API changes each version? Yawn...

Seriously, it will stabilise eventually. Without these changes, we wouldn't have some of the best features (like the new Cairo stuff and CSS styles). These developers sound like they'd rather hack on a 1990s desktop than actually try and make something the least bit modern.

How many gtk+ themes have you created/maintained _since_ Gnome 3 was released, exactly? (ie: after CSS, etc was introduced)

Judging by your comment, i am guessing a big fat ZERO... They break themes on every point release, it is hugely annoying for anyone trying to maintain multiple themes (for others to use). Themes often don't break 'gracefully' and your left to figure out what happened... But of course, this not only affects people whom are providing themes, but also end users... Sure, people using a 6month release-cycle distro, probably don't get bitten hard, since they will be re-installing anyway for the next release (unless they dist-upgrade), but for those of us who are using rolling release model - it blows; you update (even if not a gnome user) and your gtk3 apps are borked...

so i don't think we are discussing a 90's desktop vs. a modern one - the 90s desktop doesn't even come into question - ie: it's the modern one that is constantly breaking (and it's been this for what (?) a year and a half of this now (?)... So in terms of stabilizing - it does beg the question ~ When is it going to stablize??? 2yrs, maybe 3yrs?).

I dropped all of my themes and only maintain my own theme, for my own machines. If Gnome hadn't have continued to break theming constantly, i would probably be maintaining 5-6 themes right now :\ So maybe you don't see this as an issue ~ but it is, they need to iron out theming and provide a stable gtk+ that doesn't break on every update.

...and as a side note: ironically, the only theme they maintain / that doesn't break is probably in the top 5 crappiest themes ever conceived of (Adwaita). hilarious.

[srg_13]

GTK3 is pretty unreliable.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2038

http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/...ing-in-threes/

The theme API changes each version? Yawn...

Seriously, it will stabilise eventually. Without these changes, we wouldn't have some of the best features (like the new Cairo stuff and CSS styles). These developers sound like they'd rather hack on a 1990s desktop than actually try and make something the least bit modern.

[mark45]

GTK3 is pretty unreliable.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2038

http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/...ing-in-threes/

Thanks a lot for the links, I like rants, they're often funny and entertaining.

Nice one. Please uncover any faults made by rhe author if they exist.

Btw congratz to gtk. A healthy and truly free toolkit focused on the linux desktop without any antifeatures like CLA.

And without features as well.

[liam]

http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2012/12/18/gnome-3-and-login-performance/

Phoronix: Views Expressed Over The Health Of GTK+

After pessimistic views regarding the health of the GTK+ tool-kit project were recently shared on IRC, Alberto Ruiz took it upon himself to create some statistics about the development of this critical component to GNOME to show in fact things aren't entirely bleak...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI2MzY

I know this won't happen any time soon but I'd love it if ShellToolkit became the standard for gnome. Once it merges in the MX work it should be in a pretty good place features-wise.
Aside from that, someone really needs to get a handle on acceptable behavior for gtk contributors, especially on official places like mailing lists. Certainly I haven't noticed any outright -isms but their attitudes can be extremely aggressive. For a project that supposedly welcomes volunteers that is the exact opposite attitude that should be taken.
Checkout Otte's response to Nekohayo's post (given in the subject since this form will not let me paste into it).

[stqn]

Gtk3? pff? they can?t even make a scrollbar that works? the list of recent files and folders in the file selector seems to be totally random and is never helpful? CSS is the worst thing that happened on the web and they are using it? Gtk2 is much better.

[nzjrs]

The most misleading factors are typically charts, statistics and "studies" because one can cherry pick and mold them anyway they like. So a Gnome affiliate conducting a research or so proving Gnome/gtk is doing well is no better than Microsoft sponsoring a study on windows server.

Yeah, a survey would have probably been better.

Amiright!!!!????

[n3wu53r]

GTK3 is pretty unreliable.

I?ll apologize in advance for the sarcasm here.. I need to take another cheap shot at the Gnome developers here. GTK3 isn?t a reliable API. Maybe it should be called libgnome instead. GTK3.4 came with Gnome3.4, and wasn?t compatible with previous GTK3 themes. This means all GTK3 applications looked really ugly not only with all the GTK2 themes which don?t support GTK3 (almost all of them), but also the few which did. With this in mind we had three options:

1. Give you a desktop with poor integration and applications which look different based on the API they use (which is completely unacceptable)
2. Ditch all GTK3 applications from Mint and replace them with earlier GTK2 versions, or GTK2 or QT applications (this includes Gnome apps, but also Gdebi, Transmission and a few others)
3. Rant like mad, remove all themes, and waste countless hours in giving Mint-X and Mint-Z proper GTK ?3.4″ support even though it?s likely to break again in 3.6?

We went for option 3 ?this time?. I hope this little example was enough to convince 3rd party developers not to use GTK3. I couldn?t find any release notes or documentation explaining the regression or how to solve the issue.. I genuinely get the feeling that GTK 3.4 is developed for Gnome 3.4, that it doesn?t really matter if it breaks things and that we?re not supposed to use it outside of Gnome.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2038

http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/

[bug77]

Nice one. Please uncover any faults made by rhe author if they exist.

Well, the fault is trying to judge the health of a project by the number of contributors. Of course, the issue being discussed was whether there are more or less developers contributing to GTK+ and with regard to that, the trend seems to be going up (though 3.6 seems to have lost about 20 contributors since 3.4).

However, the number of contributors alone tells very little. What really counts is the number of newly enabled features and squashed bugs. That blog post isn't looking at this. The other issue is looking at GTK+ alone. While the author seems to be content with about 60 contributors, you can count just below 200 people that have committed something to Qt during the past year. I don't know, maybe it takes 3x more people on Qt to do the same job as they would in GTK+, but going solely by the numbers being discussed, there are things GTK+ could improve upon.