GTK Developers Continue Firming Up Their Long-Term Toolkit Plans

[trek]

but really, who cares? hopefully they will learn how to use git for the development version some day

[ssokolow]

"Updates within long-term stable series will be ABI stable." <- what does it mean ??? We are dealing withan Antivirus here.

If they changed API / ABI /themes .....they screw it up the only thing they left it is the name ''GTK'' /without number
why they not create a binding library between all versions of GTK to make it possible to adapt my old application with the last GTK without recompile it ??
All what we need in this world a sample widgets (a window and some buttons)... why they make it harder .

The problem is that what you want is often impossible (or at least impossible to do without Wine-like levels of unreliability) for the same reason that it's necessary to switch from X11 to Wayland. By writing to the old API, you don't provide GTK+ with enough information to do what the new API needs and they keep coming up with new APIs because they didn't realize they were asking for too little information.

Daniel Stone's witty talk, The Real Story Behind Wayland and X, given excellent examples of how that principle applies in the real world. (And when I say witty, I mean that I've watched it 4 or 5 times since it was posted in 2013.)

When Microsoft wanted to add Unicode support, they added a second set of text APIs and kept the first one.
When GTK+ wanted to add Unicode support, they made sure you could install GTK+ 1.2 and GTK+ 2.x side-by-side so that, if you don't actually have any non-Unicode apps, you can remove GTK+ 1.2 right away. Windows users aren't so lucky.

[tessio]

So.. will we have gnome 3.90? Will GTK 3.90 work alongside 3.22?