Re: GTK and OSX: a call to sanity

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Sep 7, 2011, at 7:26 AM, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> On Wed, 2011-09-07 at 08:25 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> 
>> Windows and Linux build issues and support are handled on gnome.org: the
>> Quartz backend of gtk is not in any regard special and it should not
>> need separate resources.
> 
> One thing we have been bad at is learning to accept that sometimes, our
> Gnome ecosystem breeds little niches of their own, and then some of them
> turn into rightful ecosystems that *don't really need* much
> communication with the mainline - they can exist on their own, with
> occasional re-syncs, and with occasional pain.
> 
> I imagine that the Quartz backend is such a case: it probably started as
> a "let's port this and see where it takes us" exercise, and then people
> started writing jhbuild modulesets for apps, integration patches, etc.
> It started growing and generating its own gravity and it didn't really
> need to share much with Gnome or GTK+ proper - it would have been nice
> to keep everything integrated from the start, in both code and
> infrastructure, but it would probably have implied a lot of extra work
> for both parties.
> 
> *Now* it seems to be the time where the cost of keeping things separate
> is greater than just re-syncing periodically - so let that be; do the
> integration and forget about the temporary "split".  You can think of
> this work of merging as the necessary work to meld two ecosystems
> together - you can't put a desert next to a jungle without a savannah in
> the middle.  Okay, bad analogy, but I'm only on my first coffee today.
> 

It's important not to confuse Gtk-OSX with Gtk's quartz backend. The latter is completely part of Gtk, and I use Gtk's facilities exclusively for working on it... except for ige-mac-integration, a library which allows Gtk applications to use the Mac menu bar and Dock menus, and is still a separate project because I haven't mad time to integrate it. OTOH, I wrote the gtkselection implementation 2 years ago and the patch [1] is still in the review hopper, so I'm not the only one short on time.

The rest of Gtk-OSX isn't Gtk. It's a build system using jhbuild with its own modulesets, a python script for making application bundles, and a few other bits and pieces, including gtk-quartz-engine, a Cocoa HIT theme engine which I haven't touched since Richard Hult left it to me except to ensure that the github and git.gnome.org repos are the same. I don't even know if it works with Gtk3.

What's the cost of keeping those bits on Sourceforge vs. Gnome.org? ISTM it will cost me a lot of time and effort to move them into gnome.org with no real benefit to anyone except Emmanuele who can't seem to get an SF account. (Emmanuele, if you really want to sort that out, email me directly and I'll see what I can do to help.)

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=571582