Re: State of GTK3 (especially the theme api)

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Sun, 2010-01-31 at 19:01 -0500, Clemens Eisserer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Does anybody know whats the state of GTK3? Whats the estimated release date?
> I am especially interested in what the theme api looks like?
> 
> All wiki pages I found were quite outdate :-(
> 
> I ask because about 2 years ago I proposed changes to GTK's theme api
> (bug 515600) allowing non-gtk applications (like FireFox and Java) to
> efficiently use it, and was told I should wait for GTK-3. That was 2
> years ago and it still doesn't look like GTK3 is arround the corner.
> The changes were completly backward-compatible.
> 
> For now both FireFox and Java render theme elements twice into
> pixmaps, read the result back and compare pixel-values in order to
> find out which areas are transparent. ARGB pixmaps could help here,
> but there would still be a client-server roundtrip, including VRAM
> readbacks and GPU stalls. With a theme-api which would allow to render
> to cairo-image surfaces everything would be way easier.


Hi Clemens,

I also attempted to convert the existing API to cairo, but I found that
the resulting patch was very large and I came to the conclusion that it
would be more advantageous to take the opportunity not just convert the
existing API to cairo, but also to improve it to fix various short
comings.

I've been thinking about a possible API for some time and researched
several methods currently in use in other toolkits (Windows, Qt, etc).

I wrote a short description of my proposal and thoughts on my blog:

http://blogs.gnome.org/thos/2010/01/22/monet-a-widget-drawing-api/

I would be very interested to hear of what the GTK+ developer team think
of the ideas.


Regards,

Thomas