Re: Gtk-OSX Frameworks (was: Why are developers...)

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Nov 10, 2009, at 4:16 AM, Paul Davis wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 1:10 PM, Jack Skellington <dacobi gmail com>  
> wrote:
>
> > Also if a native Gtk+ OS X framework were available people who are
> > maintaining Gtk+ apps would have the option to extend their user base
> > to OS X quite quickly.
>
> All it requires to use it is to build the GTK stack yourself using the
> instructions provided (i wish the instructions had not been moved away
> from gnome.org, but they are still easy to find). I should put "all"
> in quotes because if you choose to follow bleeding edge GTK then you
> will find that maintaining your built version can be quite a lot of
> work in the face of breakages and changes in many different parts of
> the stack. This is not true (or at least, it is MUCH less true) if you
> use a recent release version (there are instructions on how to do that
> included in the gtk osx build info).
>
> I do not believe that using a pre-built GTK OS X framework is
> desirable for users or developers. Include GTK as part of your app
> bundle. Its not hard to do and gives you complete control over which
> version of GTK is used by your app. We do this for Ardour (and now
> Mixbus) (screenshots at http://ardour.org/ and
> http://mixbus.harrisonconsoles.com/). Users download a single app, and
> run it. No framework installation or maintainance.

I haven't built and made available updated frameworks because the  
approach Richard used to create the first one (still hanging around on gtk-osx.org 
, as previously noted elsewhere) didn't produce a result that I think  
I can support. I have in mind a modification of ige-mac-bundler which  
I think will provide better results, but other tasks have higher  
priority at the moment.

Some others, including me, have done some work on the gtk-osx- 
frameworks, and the network graph at github shows that my tree (http://github.com/jralls/gtk-osx-framework 
) is current with all of them . Do be aware that there are 3 branches,  
of which master is probably the only one which will get you close  
enough to use.

I also agree with Paul here: The Apple Framework idiom doesn't make  
sense for cross-platform development. It uses special #include syntax  
and special linking. It doesn't play well with pkg-config. Yes, those  
are solvable problems, but why? The regular gnu autotools work very  
well indeed on OSX, and one needs to use it anyway for building on  
Linux. Why deal with another build chain just for the dubious benefit  
of using XCode instead of emacs or vim?

Add to that that it's hard to build a non-trivial application using  
only gtk+. You're going to need a bunch of other libraries, either  
from gnome, gnu, or freedesktop. They're not going to be in  
Frameworks, so you're going to have to integrate them the autotools  
way, so what do you gain from having gtk+ in a set of frameworks?

There is one exception to which I'm quite sympathetic: PyGtk. At  
present building a downloadable PyGtk app bundle is a royal pain, and  
a PyGtk framework *might* be part of the solution.

Regards,
John Ralls