Re: GTK and CinePaint

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 23:22, Robin Rowe wrote:

> Ok, so long as everyone understands my reasons are not intended as
> criticism, nor as a call for changes to GTK2.
> 
> http://cinepaint.bigasterisk.com/WhyMigrateFromGTKToFLTK

I'm posting these comments here for the benefit of the other list
members.

You should really investigate moving CinePaint to GTK+ 2.4.  1.2 is
really old, unsupported, and numerous bugfixes have gone in since then. 
There's a guide to porting apps from GTK+ 1.2 to 2.x:

	http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/porting/

(Ignore the bits about GNOME; look at the GTK+ chapter.)

Many changes can be done with a perl script to replace e.g.
gtk_signal_connect with g_signal_connect.  You can also replace obsolete
APIs in stages by using the deprecation flags when building.

At Ximian we had to port a lot of code that used GTK+ 1.2, during the
time of the migration from GNOME 1.4 to GNOME 2.0, and it was reasonably
easy to do.  It's mostly grunt work.  Feel free to ask if you get stuck.

GTK+ has a large development community, even full-time paid hackers
working on it, so you can be confident that it will always have people
interested in keeping it up-to-date.

It looks like your main showstopper is the threading issue on Win32. 
Maybe you would like to invest some time in fixing it?  Changing to a
completely unrelated toolkit is a very large job, especially for an app
as big as CinePaint.  Other toolkits will have the same problem on
Win32, or they may already have a solution from which you can get
inspiration.

  Federico