Re: Mac OS X Port of GTK+

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

on 9/8/01 1:47 PM, Finlay Dobbie at finlay dobbie btinternet com wrote:

> First off, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Finlay, I'm 14, and I'm
> from the UK. I use Mac OS X as my main OS. I have been using GTK+ under
> XFree86, but there is a large overhead imposed by this, and it's not
> terribly well integrated to OS X. I am willing to head a project to
> bring GTK+ natively to Quartz, OS X's graphics environment and window
> server.

Sounds interesting. I'm an OS X user too. I'd be willing to help you finish
once you got a big part of this done. It's a huge job, but it would probably
be fun.

> I am planning on using the Cocoa API, which is actually Objective-C.

I think there is a C API for Quartz. What's the reason you need to use the
Cocoa API? This sounds wrong to me.

> At 
> first glance, it looks like I'll need to rework a lot of gdk. Anybody
> want to give me a quick overview of where to start and how to tackle
> this? Should I work on the 1.2 or the 1.3 codebase? Anyone interested in
> helping out? :-)

You should definitely start with the 1.3 code, not the 1.2. There are 3
"back ends" for GDK right now. One for X, one for Win32, and one for a raw
framebuffer. I think the Win32 port should give you lots of clues about what
you'd need to do to get everything working with Quartz. There's more than
just graphics that you'd need to deal with (clipboard and drag and drop, for
example).

Note that doing this Quartz port will not change the appearance of the
contents of GTK to match Aqua (although it will make the window borders be
real Aqua-style windows). That's something you need to be aware of at the
outset.

    -- Darin