Re: a new combo box

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 28 December 2014 at 17:23, Morten Welinder <mortenw gnome org> wrote:
> > on the contrary: with a new class you'd be sure that the GtkComboBox
> > widget API is finally "stable" — as in "no changes, except for bug
> > fixes" — which is apparently what you want.
>
> There are three types of widgets in the gtk+ world: (1) active and
> non-deprecated, (2) deprecated, and (3) deprecated and removed.

(3) is nonsense. deprecated classes are still there, unless you bring
me an example of an ABI break in the same major release.

if by "removed" you mean "unmaintained" then we can somewhat agree.
stuff still happens in deprecated widgets, but generally the things
that are deemed broken can either be solved by a change in behaviour —
which is usually met by a "don't do that because otherwise you're
breaking my 10 years old application with X users why do you hate us
so much" — or by adding new API — which usually means that people
notice this stuff two years down the line, because long-term support
distributions won't add a new release of GTK with that API.

> So, no.  I don't want the API stability in (3).  And the "bug fixes" part
> for (2) is by and large PR.  In the real world, it doesn't happen and
> I am regularly reminded of this when 10 year old bug reports get
> closed wontfix or obsolete.

stuff gets closed as OBSOLETE/WONTFIX if no patch has materialized in
10 years, or if that requires new API/behavioural changes — see above
why.

examples where that hasn't happened would be nice.

> Emmanuele, why are you so cavalier about inflicting pain and work
> on application writers?

why are you so cavalier in imposing even more work on the toolkit
maintainers, while simultaneously whinging about every single change
in the toolkit that causes you to spend time maintaining your own
application?

again, if you don't want the toolkit to ever deprecate anything, or to
maintain even deprecated classes with the same amount of resources we
have, I strongly suggest you start helping out the maintainership of
the toolkit itself, instead of filing bugs with "fix this like this"
and waiting for a patch to arrive.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
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[ ] ebassi [ gmail com]