Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] gtk/gtk2/gtk3 USE flag situation

[Ian Stakenvicius]

On 27/05/16 10:21 AM, Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> [ Snip! ]


Agree on all other portions above; its the Applications part below
that is most contentious though and is also what I care most about:


> * Applications may only use a gtk2 based stack or gtk3 based stack in a
> given version/revision. gtk3 is strongly preferred when it is deemed to
> not have any regressions compared to gtk2 build, but the choice is
> ultimately with the maintainer. Once the application converts to using
> gtk3 in our distribution, it should try hard to stay that way in
> upcoming versions as well.
>
> * Some exceptions to the above may exist under heavy consideration,
> especially in cases where the toolkit usage is complex and may have
> some issues for some, but in general gtk3 support is deemed good by
> upstream. Most notable here would be browsers like firefox and
> chromium, which are using gtk dependency more for emulating the theme
> it uses, rather than using it as its real toolkit. If such exceptions
> are allowed, the USE flag naming here must be consistent amongst the
> exceptions. My proposal would be USE=force-gtk2 then, as I have no
> better ideas without stomping on the USE=gtk{2,3} historical meaning.


Personally I don't see an issue at all with maintainers of
applications allowing a package to be built against gtk2 instead of
gtk3 even if gtk3 is deemed "good enough" by upstream.  There are a
number of end-users (myself included) that prefer the gtk2 experience
over gtk3, and so to me I'd like to not limit what app maintainers
want to do, but rather just limit the way they can do it.  The
'force-gtk2' flag to me seems appropriate for this, especially since
this type of choice should explicitly not be linked to a flag in any
profiles (and i believe both gtk2 and gtk3 exist in some profile or
another).


> When arguing in favor of supporting gtk2 builds more for apps, please
> do keep in mind that gtk2 really is pretty much dead. And no, MATE,
> XFCE and others are NOT continuing its support; they are just slow in
> fully converting to gtk3, but they are doing so and I expect both of
> those to be fully done this year, around autumn.
> If the issue is political or just a general gnome3 or gtk3 hate, then I
> would ask you to keep your political opinions or hate outside this
> thread and go contemplate on more important life issues.
> If the issue is lack of themes, then I would like you to help package
> more gtk3 themes. gtk3.20 now has a stable CSS based theme API and
> themes shouldn't be breaking anymore beyond this point, theoretically.
> And gtk3 theme packages should pretty much just be CSS files and some
> metadata. Though we have yet to get over that bumpy thing yet (a main
> reason gtk3.20 isn't in main tree yet).


As to the death of gtk2, well, despite firefox officially adopting
gtk3 as the default in 46.0 there's still a lot of open bugs, some of
which have been around for years, and the other mozilla products have
barely tried to port their UIs over.  I expect it will be 2018 at
least before mozilla doesn't officially need gtk2 anymore.  Dead
upstream or not, I expect there will still be consumers of gtk2 for a
few years yet.