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On 05/27/2016 04:21 PM, Mart Raudsepp wrote: |
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> Hello, |
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> |
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> Despite it being 2016 and gtk2 pretty much dead, buried and forgotten |
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> upstream, many applications still support only gtk2, have subtle issues |
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> with their gtk3 port, or support both, with some of our userbase |
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> clinging to gtk2 for dubious political or aesthetical reasons. |
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> |
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> For the latter cases, despite GNOME teams policy and strong preference |
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> on not providing a choice and just choosing gtk2 or gtk3 (gtk3 if it's |
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> working as good as gtk2), some cases exist where the maintainers want |
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> to provide such choice. In some cases it is understandable for a short |
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> while during transition, e.g firefox. In other cases, it is purely for |
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> the sake of providing the choice of working with a deprecated toolkit, |
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> apparently. |
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> |
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> My highly biased essay aside, we need to finally globally agree on what |
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> we do in this situation. If we allow this choice at all, only for |
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> special cases, or widespread. And if this choice is provided, how do we |
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> name the USE flag. |
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Looking at the gtk-apps I use ... |
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|
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|
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Firefox with gtk3 is TOFU. UI elements are invisible, Scrollbars are |
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broken, etc. |
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The font rendering is hilariously wrong, even more so than gtk2. I'd |
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call this "late alpha" if I'm in a good mood. |
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("wrong" ? well, everything else at fontsize ~8-9 is the same as gtk2 at |
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fontsize 24, and gtk3 at ~32. Which means that the defaults are |
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literally unreadable because text ends up 3 pixels high. I have no idea |
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why everything else understands config, and special snowflake has to |
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guess instead...) |
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|
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Thunderbird ... oy vey. The new new theme in 45.1 after a new theme in |
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45 repeats all the problems with font rendering, and it's "flat" because |
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who needs to know where UI elements are, where they end, or if they are |
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active/usable. Also fun that *now* it is 'catching up' with the UI |
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stupidity of Android-4, which is abandoned. Change to have change ... :\ |
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|
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I think Chromium uses their own layer of madness on top of gtk. |
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Chromium-51 has a tiny URL bar which is not resizable (sizing only |
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affects the html viewport). It is proportionally smaller than |
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Chromium-50, so I guess they switched to gtk3 too. |
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|
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|
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All in all: GTK+-3 looks substantially worse, has wrong font rendering |
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(which gtk2 already got wrong), and I consider it a strict downgrade |
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from gtk2. So where I can, when I can, I will aim to keep gtk2 until I |
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can switch to something that isn't dead upstream or just braindead. |
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|
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So while I understand that you don't want to support a toolkit that has |
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no or little support (like qt4, btw, which is abandoned but only about |
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half the things have been ported to qt5) ... as long as it's not at |
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feature-parity some users like me will fight for the option to have |
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usable software. And that means, for now, requiring gtk2 / gtk3 useflags |
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to allow us to choose the correct version where possible. I don't care |
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much how it is exposed, I don't consider "force-gtk2" worse than "gtk2" |
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or "partial-sanity". But it'll take a lot of improvement before you can |
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consider deprecating gtk2, and crude methods like the suggested |
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package.use.mask will motivate me to fix the mistake by reverting it. |
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|
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(I remember fighting with ssuominen over guvcview, he always tried to |
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remove the last gtk2 version of it, I readded it because otherwise |
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there's a whole pile of new bad dependencies, he'd remove it again, I |
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readded it, lots of fun. Let's not play that game too much please ...) |
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Thanks, |
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|
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Patrick |