Fully winding down my involvement in GTK+

[Kristian Rietveld <kris loopnest org>]

Hi all,

I have tried to maintain GtkTreeView ever since I took over from Jonathan Blandford many years ago and in the more recent years the OS X backend which I took over from Richard Hult. During the last 1,5 years, I have been struggling to keep up with the development pace of GTK+. As many have likely noticed, I barely had time to do patch review let alone do any code writing myself. More than a 100% attention is currently going to my day job.

Also, I struggle to identify with the community these days -- that is, I do not agree how GTK+ is being developed. Discussions appear to mainly happen on IRC, which I can impossibly follow, contrary to on the mailing list; I have seen things being refactored without seriously considering the impact on compatibility or other platforms; and after working an entire Summer on the sort and filter model, a patch was committed there without even quickly checking for review.

So, in Open Source, either you step up and do something about it, or you back out. I have no spare cycles to step up, so I made the choice to back out. I will discontinue maintenance and patch review and move to other things. There are a few small OS X issues I still plan to fix, but that will be all.


I will not completely disappear and might still do an occasional contribution. I hope to find time for other things, also related to GTK+ and GNOME, like my GObject Clang plugin which I want to clean up and upload somewhere. Or some GIMP hacking. Also, I will be around in the fine LibreOffice community.


Best regards,

-kris.