Re: Building multiple backends on on same system

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> With the rise of wayland, and perhaps with my html5 backend
> (http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2010/11/23/gtk3-vs-html5/) we will
> increasingly be in the situation where a single system will have
> multiple versions of gtk+ installed for different backends.
>
> This is handled pretty badly atm. Each app or library that links to gtk+
> will have to be recompiled and the binaries duplicated, even if most
> stuff don't use weird backend-specific hacks and thus could really be
> reused.
>
> In my opinion we should move all the supported public entrypoints to the
> core gdk library and make the backend a loadable module. I'm not sure
> how exactly we should expose e.g. the X specific stuff, but I think it
> would be doable with some kind of loose coupling like an interface.
>

Yes, something along these lines needs to happen.
grepping for GDK_WINDOWING_X11 finds

gtkapplication.c
gtkclipboard.c
gtkcolorsel.c
gtkdnd.c
gtkselection.c
gtksettings.c
gtkstatusicon.c
gtkwindow.c

Some of this can just be converted into runtime checks.