Re: Notes and thoughts on the GTK+ meeting at GUADEC

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2009/8/14 Kristian Rietveld <kris gtk org>:
> Hi All,
> A different way to start working on the new features is to decide on a
> feature set first, research the features and (if required) make
> required changes *before* an ABI frozen GTK+ 3.0 is put out.  This
> brings up the next question: what features to research first?  For
> this, I think we need to talk with our prime users: GNOME, GIMP,
> Mono/MonoDevelop, XFCE, etc, etc (this list is of course fully up for
> discussion).  Make them aware of the existence of the roadmap and ask
> them what features are most important to them and which they feel are
> missing.  Talk with the most active people involved in theming and art
> (there really is much going on in there right now) to come to
> consensus on a feature set with regards to theming; this is important
> because it will tell us what GtkStyle should be "migrated" to.  Also
> look at outstanding patches adding new features in Bugzilla.  This is
> an information gathering phase that can be turned into a GtkTask[4].
> If people agree with this approach, we can turn this into a more
> formal and clear description of the work.

First things first, thanks a lot Kris for taking the bullet and
kickstarting this discussion, congrats for finishing college and I'm
really excited to "have you back" ;-)

As for theming, I've been discussing a bit with Thomas, Carlos and
Cody. We have reached some sort of consensus that a backwards
compatible path is possible adding a second vtable for engines,
checking the vtable size and working out a structured way to poke the
scene graph representation. However, we need time to try these things
out. Thomas pointed out that working on a separate theming library
makes a lot of sense as it would allow reaching a nice API and it
would help the special purpose GObject baed toolkits around to have
proper theming as well (say Nbtk, Glitter...).

So I think that we've reached the conclusion that theming shouldn't
get in the way of the current 3.0 plans, as we don't have time to
deprecate GtkStyle and introduce something new all at once
(eventhough, we all would have loved to make it).

There's the issue of CSS though. Would it be acceptable to deprecate
gtkrc's in the middle of the 3.0 cycle in favor of CSS theming files?
This is an area where I'm pretty much blind, prolly Robert Staudinger
has a better picture than me here, Robert?

Now, what I'd love to see is having IRC meetings back, ebassi and
myself talked roughly about it on IRC, seems that mclasen has a
toughest schedule these days. Anyone up to figure out hours/date to
have a 3.0 kickstart meeting and do some rock and roll?

As I said, thanks a lot for the heads up Kris!

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz