Re: help me catch up on GTK gui tools

[Magnus Bergman <magnus bergman observer net>]

On Sat, 5 Aug 2006 22:18:48 -0600
"Brett Stottlemyer" <stottle qadas com> wrote:

> 1)       Older, stable versions of gtk/gtkglext/glade/mm's (binary
> package versions)
> 
> a.       Pro - stable, easy to install
> 
> b.       Con - Difficult to upgrade?  Doesn't have newer features.
> 
> 2)       Stable GTK with Glade v2
> 
> a.       Pro - newer version of GTK
> 
> b.       Con - older version of Glade, does it support newer GTK
> features?
> 
> 3)       Stable GTK with Glade v3
> 
> a.       Pro - newer GTK
> 
> b.       Con - Unstable Glade
> 
> 4)       Unstable GTK with GTKBuilder - available in GTK 2.12 betas?
> 
> a.       Pro - most future proof?  Part of GTK, so no need to wait for
> dependency updates (big benefit)?
> 
> b.       Con - Unstable


Every version in the 2.x series are equally future proof since
they are, and will remain, backward compatible. I would recommend to
use the version that is easiest to install (the binary packages you
mention) unless you depend on some feature from a newer version. If you
find some feature of an old version has been deprecated by
a newer feature it might be a good idea to upgrade and use the newer
feature instead, but it is guaranteed that the deprecated one will
still work with every upcoming release in the 2.x series of GTK+ & co.
(I'm not entirely sure this also applies to the mm-libraries, but I
think they are at least source compatible.)

Glade 2 and 3 are also compatible so you could probably install both
and use them interchangeably. I still use version 2 since version 3 was
a little too unstable last time I tried it (but it was quite a while
ago now).