libgtk3deprecated (Re: About GTK+ 3.0 and deprecated things)

[Tim Janik <timj imendio com>]

On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Martin Meyer wrote:

> Several people have mentioned the "move the deprecated stuff into a
> separate library" idea. Can we get some concrete answers on:
>
> 1) Would this satisfy the various apps still using the deprecated
> code? i.e. is it OK to depend on this different library in the future
> in addition to gtk-3? Are there any arguments against this, aside from
> the effort/time involved?

It'd certainly reduce the pain for application developers that still use
deprecated widgets such as CTree or ItemFactory.

> 2) Is it entirely possible from a gtk perspective to have all that
> code detached from gtk-core and placed in a different library? Are
> there any deprecated things that this would *not* work for? Maybe we
> can detach as many as possible and leave the rest in place for now.

Complete deprecated widgets should be fairly easy to separarte,
single deprecated functions that some components may have can be
hard to impossible to move when the implementation requires
access to internals.

> 3) How long / how much effort would it be do to this? Is it something
> that has to be done by experienced GTK hackers or can it be handled as
> a side project?

I think any moderately experienced developer could tackle this (e.g.
someone who has implemented his own widget at some point).

A closing word on the library name, since this'd be an ABI break,
such a library only makes sense for Gtk+-3.0 (or 2.99.0) and should
probably advertise that it ships deprecated Gtk+ stuff. So the best
name is probably libgtk3deprecated for this (there could possibly
be a libgtk4deprecated as well at some point).

> Martin

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ciaoTJ