Re: GTK on Macintosh OSX

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 07:29 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> Regarding the general question of non-X11 backends being 2nd-class
> citizens ... yes, I have seen and suffered from this problem when I
> was doing work on gtk/osx last year and the previous year. It would be
> nice if we could somehow get the core GTK team to commit to not making
> changes that are not tested on non-X11 backends, but this seems
> unlikely and the reasons are not totally unreasonable.

There is no fixed "core" GTK+ team.

The way we've always determined who gets listed in the GTK+ release
announcements as the "team" is simply to look at who has done lots of
work and taken ownership of components.

[ It looks like the team list in some of the recent release
announcements has gotten a bit stale; the 2.16 list includes me among
some other people not doing much work at the moment. ]

If someone wants to make sure that the OS/X port is released working out
of the box for 2.18, they have to be building from git, fixing problems
that come up, going through patches in bugzilla, etc.

And then that person will be on the "team" and the team can make the
commitment you want.

In the past, when I've made changes that require per-backend changes,
I've generally tried to stub out the necessary parts of the other
backends if stubs make any sense. E.g.,

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587247

Adds a backend function that is called after processing updates;
backends that don't need to do anything there don't need to do anything
so stubbing out was very reasonable. But other changes do require actual
work, and requiring every person submitting a patch to GDK to:

 A) Have a OS/X machine and a windows machine
 B) Know enough about OS/X and windows programming to make changes

Doesn't seem reasonable. (As you say.) Requiring people making changes
to GDK to provide the docs and test cases so that the people maintaining
the backends can easily add the missing functionality is, on the other
hand, quite reasonable.

- Owen