RE: Long-term survival
My own estimation is that I can't see a GTK2 port being
anywhere near ready by the time of the 22.0 release. In fact
I suspect that the Xft patch will get into the mainline
before GTK2; at least they have a substantial codebase so
show off at the moment.
Hmm. I do have an old patch sitting around that completely Mule-izes the
GTK code and cleans up some other problems. Right now I'm swamped with
school-related stuff but this will pass in a few days and I'll see about
getting some of this stuff posted/checked in.
But what is the problem with GTK2? Does it not support the GTK1 interfaces?
Is there a huge interface change?
Another patch I have sitting around extracts out some of the duplicated
redisplay code between X and GTK. This may help. (It's always annoyed me
that Bill took the "shortcut" of just copying huge amounts of code rather
than doing the abstraction work -- in the long term this is *not* a shortcut
but just a recipe for bitrot.)
I'd like to see this advantage continued, so it should
integrate with whatever desktop service are available on the
platform. Eg, The Cocoa port in MacOS X should support the
Services menu, the GTK and KDE versions should support their
themes and file managers, etc. If these are ignored then
we'll be like xcalc on modern desktops, perfectly functional
but old fashioned and less appealing.
The GTK contributions are part of my efforts to make this
Like a reality.
I completely agree. Cleaning up the widgets is one of my long-term goals
(another workspace I have contains a fair amount of widget work) but it will
take awhile.
ben