Re: Get rid of deprecated widgets

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 13:04 +0100, Mathias Hasselmann wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 05.12.2007, 12:17 +0100 schrieb Mikael Hermansson:
> > Hello! Some thoughts
> > 
> > For years now there has been widgets that is deprecated in Gtk+
> > 
> > GtkList
> > GtkCList
> > GtkFileSel
> > GtkCTree
> > GtkItemFactory
> > 
> > Imho it really is time to kill this or atleast add an option in
> > Makefile/configure to not include them as default.

compile gtk+ with the GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED flag.


> I am also supporting this idea for a long time: There is no point in
> deprecating code, if you plan to support it forever.

deprecated widgets are *not* supported: bugs are not fixed in CList,
CTree and the FileSelection dialog, for instance.

>  Regarding ABI
> stability: That old code could be moved into libgtk-compat-2.0.so.

no, because that would break the ABI: every application compiled against
gtk+ 2.x-with-deprecated-on would *cease to work* if run against gtk+
2.y-with-deprecated-off because the symbols would reside inside another
library.

if an application is compiled against gtk+ 2.x then it must continue
running against gtk+ 2.x+1, otherwise it's an ABI break.

> - link against an old version of gtk - for what other reason gtk is
> using libtool's -version-info switch?
> - link against libgtk-compat-2.0.

you are assuming the ability to recompile applications, which is not
always the case.

> Its really pointless to pay of this old stuff everyday, when none of
> your daily programs uses those old and deprecated symbols.

I fail to understand why people still cling to this argument, when it
has been rebuked time and again: if you are not using any deprecated
widget you are not paying any penalty - except for the size of the
library on disk (the symbols will not be paged in).

if you really case about disk usage you should be using a gtk+ compiled
without the deprecations, and there's a compile time switch to do that
already.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net