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

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2016 at 04:55:40PM -0700, Matthew Brush wrote:
> 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.

Ok, I have a different opinion. I don't like writing conditional code
depending on a certain version of a library. It makes the code harder to
read (and thus can contain more bugs) and harder to test.

But I understand that it can be useful to use a new version of an app on
an old distro. In the future container systems like Flatpak will be much
more widespread I think, so it'll make app development easier, you can
target only one version of GTK+ and be able to install the app on old
distros or newer distros.

> 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.

I will use scripts from:
https://github.com/swilmet/gnome-c-utils

I don't think those scripts can be useful for generating a compatibility
header. I will just do a substitution GtkSource -> Gsv, not each symbol
separately.

--
Sébastien