Re: disabling GTK+ features to shrink GTK+

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

On 15.06.2010 02:16, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
>   
>> 2010/6/14 Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>:
>>     
>>> A more socially-minded approach would be to work on the problem of
>>> sharing a GTK+ runtime between all apps on a system. It's perhaps not
>>> an easy problem, due different requirements in versions and specific
>>> libraries, but it's a more long-term solution to the problem of GTK+'s
>>> big runtime than for each app using GTK+ on Windows to build and
>>> distribute their own incompatible versions.
>>>       
>> That is just not how you ship stuff on Windows unfortunately, there is
>> no apt/zypper/yum like thing for Windows (though MS seems to be
>> working on that apparently).
>>
>> tml and myself went through this problem again and again, even if
>> GTK+'s API is stable, guaranteeing GTK+'s ABI on Windows is just
>> impossible for several reasons, a common GTK+ runtime is just not the
>> way to go. Easing the bundling process of Gtk+ into a windows
>> app/installer, and reducing the amount of dependencies is the way to
>> go.
>>     
> That may be, but 'disable this random set of widgets I don't need'
> patches have very little chance of going upstream.
>   

I wonder how many dependencies are in between the widgets. If not many
one could make gtk plugin based. Like having a gtkcore with the
baseclasses, paint engine and event system only. All widgets are
provided by plugins. That is a plugin can provide several widgets. And
thus you can have e.g. gtkcorewidgets.so, gtkcoredialogs.so, ... .
GStreamer has some of the plugin infrastructure to borrow :) But maybe
its total overkill ...

Stefan