Deprecated widgets on Stack Overflow [was: a new combo box]

[Philip Chimento <philip chimento gmail com>]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 2:29 AM, Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org> wrote:

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 2:26 AM, Philip Chimento <philip chimento gmail com> wrote:

Assuming that questions on Stack Overflow are an approximate poll of what application authors do - many application authors go to the documentation and do exactly that. (And often don't bother to read any further - I've often enough seen questions about a deprecated widget such as GtkList which was selected purely based on its name.)

We are getting a bit off the topic of the thread, but this is an interesting observation.

Can you link to some examples of this? I would be curious why that is the case - i.e. which medium was used to consult the documentation, because on the website deprecated classes are quite clearly marked in a separate section at the bottom of the reference (https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/unstable/).

Sure, I was curious about more substantiated data than just my own memory :-)

I did searches on Stack Overflow for some widgets that were deprecated in GTK 2, see some results below. It looks like in at least one case a developer found an outdated GTK 1.x tutorial online and just ran with it. In most other cases the widgets seem to have been picked for their names, although it's hard to tell what the question askers were thinking exactly. In one case someone asked why there were two widgets for the same thing, having missed the deprecation warning completely.

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159052/what-is-the-best-widget-with-gtk-for-chat-window-irc

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6801370/python-clist-widget-not-returning-expected-list-returns-only-the-first-characte

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27495030/rgtk2-gtkcombo-get-current-selected-text

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4404610/linux-and-gtk-gtkfileselection-vs-gtkfilechooserdialog

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5012739/get-text-from-textbox-in-gtk

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16586635/add-tooltip-to-gtkbutton

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17390960/how-to-use-gtk-tree-error

Here are some more questions where the asker is aware the widget is deprecated but wants to use it anyway or isn't sure what to use instead. Or perhaps isn't sure why 'deprecated' is a bad thing, in the last link: "I know GtkList is deprecated and should be replaced with GtkTreeView + GtkListStore. However, I do want to use GtkList in current situation since GtkListStore is more complex."

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8162547/gtk-how-to-make-labels-as-buttons-sort-of-list

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1210602/how-to-make-a-multiple-select-list-box-in-ruby-glade-gtk-maybe-using-treeview

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18908756/use-what-instead-of-deprecated-gtk-clist

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2835693/multiple-selection-with-gtkcombo

 - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20122232/gtklistc-code-how-to-get-the-selection-of-a-gtklist

I would hazard a guess that most people don't load up the docs' index page, but instead land on pages directly by googling - and so don't see the "Deprecated Widgets" section. For example if I google "gtk list widget" a GtkList tutorial page is the fourth result. [1] Although admittedly, that doesn't explain why someone wouldn't click on one of the perfectly fine top three results.

[1] http://www.pygtk.org/pygtktutorial/sec-gtklistexample.html 

-- 

Philip