Re: [RFC] Proposal for GtkSourceView 3.24, 3.50 and 3.90

[Matthew Brush <mbrush codebrainz ca>]

On 2016-11-02 04:53 AM, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 01, 2016 at 07:57:47PM -0700, Matthew Brush wrote:
> > Do you have any recommendations for applications wanting to support a range
> > of GSV versions from before and after the rename?
>
> [...]
>
> If you want to write new code in 2016 and still want to run that code on
> an LTS distro from 2014, then use only APIs that are available in the
> GTK+ and GtkSourceView versions from 2014. GtkSourceView has kept a good
> backward-compatibility. GTK+ less so (for the CSS etc). So while it can
> make sense to write conditional code depending on the GTK+ version to
> make the app work with different versions of GTK+, it doesn't make sense
> for GtkSourceView, in my opinion.

It's nice to support a range of versions so that people with older 
distros can use a new version, and people with newer distros can use new 
features, etc. Generally it's easy enough, like say supporting GTK 2 and 
3, where most of the stuff is the same or still works. This is also 
useful for supporting other platforms like Windows where you're stuck 
with whatever bundled versions you can find or whatever's packaged in msys.

Renaming every symbol makes things a bit more challenging though, not 
that I think it's a bad idea.

> [...]
>
> > I guess making a header
> > with a bunch of #defines mapping to the old names would work, but perhaps
> > there's something less tedious I missed, or some compatibility path planned?
>
> A header with a bunch of #defines could be written, if it is really
> useful for some applications, why not. But I'm not going to write it :-)
> I don't need it, and I don't see why it would be useful. But
> contribution welcome.

I will probably go this route if the need arises. Are you planning to 
use a script to automate the renaming of symbols? If so, that might be 
useful for generating such a header.

Thanks for the response.

Regards,
Matthew Brush