GTK 3.12 coming to Utopic?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 02/09/2014 22:45, Jim Nelson a écrit :
> I'll chime in.
>

Yeah Jim, thanks for joining the discussion !

>
> So, my question: Does Utopic support 3.12 or not?  From where I'm
> standing it looks more like 3.10-and-a-half.
>

Define "support"? We do have 3.12 in the archive and working as intended
by upstream. We have some known theming issues that are being worked
on/going to be addressed before release. I would say we have 3.12 and
it's well supported, what makes you think it's not (more on specific
issues further down)

> GTK+ 3.14 represents more than just shiny new widgets, it also has
> substantial bug fixes.  So I have to hack around bugs that have been
> fixed because I'm targeting 3.12 -- and I even have to hack around
> targeting 3.12 because of Ubuntu-specific bugs. 

Are you speaking about theming there? I'm not aware of "Ubuntu specific"
issues in GTK otherwise, could you give some specifics?

Note that 3.12 is the current upstream stable serie, it's also what
other distributions (Debian, Fedora, etc) current distribute.

If you need 3.13 for your application to work correclty, maybe as a
software writer you adapted new APIs/widgets too early? (it might be a
good ideas to give things a few cycle to settle down/go through some
testing and bugfixing before depending on those for software you push to
users)

There is also an upstream issue if upstream GTK doesn't land
"substantial bug fixes" in their stable series...

>
> I'm not trying to pick on Seb here -- honest.  I highlight these
> comments to illustrate the pressure Ubuntu's decisions put on Yorba
> (and probably other developers).

That's one way to look at the issue. Ubuntu didn't take much "decisions"
there.

The fact is that GTK added new widgets to their toolkit, and those
widgets are designed with the GNOME desktop/gnome-shell in mind (the
intend might not be to restrict their target, but in practice those
widgets don't work well on other desktops so the result is the same).

>
> Yorba works hard to make sure our applications are available to as
> many GNOME users as possible.  And yet there's only one distro that we
> have to consistently work around to support: Ubuntu.  Because of
> Unity, because of lack of widget support, because of theme and theme
> issues, because of library versions lag, and so on.

Well, that's your choice as an application developer to target
gnome-shell users and use those new widgets.

Targeting GNOME used to give you good Unity integration for free, that
reality changed since the desktop designs diverted enough that they are
somewhat different platforms.

The issue is not so much Unity or GTK in Ubuntu there, it's that you are
taking decisions in your software to integrate well in gnome-shell and
it comes in detriment of integration with other desktops. (the issue is
not limited to Unity, e.g XFCE is having the same problems with those
new widgets)

Did you consider having different/modular UI and adapting it to the
desktop you are running on ? Or using only "standard" widgets ? Look at
shotwell, it's working without issues on GNOME, Unity, XFCE, etc, there
is no reason your new application couldn't do the same...


I hope what I wrote is making sense to you. The situation is suboptimal,
but you should probably start looking at GTK as less desktop-neutral
that it used to be, and stop assuming that writing an application for
GNOME is going to give you something working as well on other platforms
or desktops without efforts on the application side.

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher