Re: Adding gtkparasite to gtk?

[Christian Hammond <chipx86 chipx86 com>]

Hi Bastien,

So, some background on the whole "ignoring patches" thing. GTK+ 2.0 support is still very important to myself and David Trowbridge, as we use it frequently in the development of VMware Workstation. (Why we're on 2.0 and not 3.0 is another topic, and not a trivial matter by any means.) We did receive several patches from contributors that brought GTK+ 3.0 support, but broke 2.0 support. Some were just copies of the other patches sent to us by different people. Each time, we said we'd land the patches if they could be made to work with 2.0 and 3.0. We never saw it happen.

Now I did miss the updates in that bug thread that mentioned that the latest version of that patch worked on both GTK 2.0 and 3.0. I'm happy to see that, and I'll take a look at it. It slipped through the cracks (we don't pay much attention to that bug tracker, since very few people have ever used it) and it got lost in the noise of patches sent to us over e-mail and GitHub pull requests that broke 2.0 support.

I'd love to get community involvement around gtkparasite. I've just never really seen it, aside from a few of the aforementioned patches. If there are a bunch of forks out there with custom patches for things, please, by all means, send them our way! We weren't even sure anybody was using the thing besides us and a couple other people.

The announcement that our project moved locations was a bit of a surprise to us. I hope you can understand. If people want to fork the project, you have every right (just don't call it gtkparasite, as that's confusing). If someone does want to step up and help us maintain the project and land patches, awesome. Just talk to us first so we can get everything squared away :)

Christian

-- 
Christian Hammond - chipx86 chipx86 com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 12:35 AM, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:

Hey Christian,

On Wed, 2012-10-10 at 01:16 +0200, Rui Tiago Cação Matos wrote:
> Hi Christian,
>
> On 10 October 2012 01:10, Christian Hammond <chipx86 chipx86 com> wrote:
> > That's a fine goal and all, but I must ask why people haven't sent us these
> > patches and worked around our repository? We're not dead, just the tool's
> > been working fine for our needs and we haven't seen any activity or support
> > around it.
> >
> > It would have been much appreciated to be contacted before assuming
> > maintainership of the project. We weren't intending to relinquish that just
> > yet, and would like to discuss it with people before that were to happen.

I've had a gtkparasite fork going with GTK+ 3.0 support for a year:
https://github.com/hadess/gtkparasite/commit/770db8faacde1aba9eaf3e45da6e39e27b565859

And the requests to get GTK+ 3.0 support committed have fallen on deaf
ears:
http://code.google.com/p/gtkparasite/issues/detail?id=18

So the patches have been sent, just that they've been ignored.

> Oh, I'm not claiming maintainership on it at all. But you're right
> that I should have contacted you first about this, my apologies.
>
> It's just that people have been doing gtkparasite forks all over the
> internet and today I decided to finally push all the fixes I knew to a
> place where a lot of interested parties can share the maintenance
> burden.
>
> If you're not happy on having it in git.gnome.org we can take it back
> down I guess.

Or we can rename it and carry on using a single shared git repo so we
don't block on a single person for maintenance.

Cheers