Re: Gtk+4.x and broadway ( and other remote options )

[Daniel Kasak <d j kasak dk gmail com>]

Hi Alexander. I appreciate you clarifying this for us. It was a nice surprise to read on Phoronix recently that you're still committing fixes & improvements to the broadway codebase. I'd like to understand - has anything changed in the past year that's brought you back to broadway? I know there are still a handful of users around who would love to see this continue ( some of them email me directly, and I have to answer: "sorry - I'm just a user as well" ). If throwing money at the problem works, we might be able to arrange that, maybe via a crowdfunding page, or something less formal. Would it be worth it to you or Redhat?

Dan

On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 2:25 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:

On ons, 2016-12-07 at 14:18 +1100, Daniel Kasak wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I posting here in response to comments on bug:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775680 ( summary: broadway
> support likely to be removed from Gtk+4.0 ).
>
> I think it would be a massive pity to drop broadway support from gtk.
> It's been a god-send for me and those I work with - it provides the
> best remote access to gtk apps and performs way better than vnc. I've
> actually been working on an authentication + transparent proxy for
> broadway, so multiple users can access multiple apps all via https on
> port 443: https://tesla.duckdns.org/transparent-proxy-for-broadway-gt
> k3-html5-backend/

So, there are two issues with broadway.

First of all, I wrote it mostly as a proof of concept of an interesting
idea. I have zero cycles to spend on it anymore, nor do any of the
other people who currently work on Gtk+. Its still there, because it
just works and is not really a burden on the existing code unless you
use it.

Secondly, while it just keeps working in gtk3, the same is not true for
Gtk4. We're doing massive changes to the internals of the drawing
model, with the end goal of having a much more modern base targeting
how current GPU hardware works. This is very much not how broadway
works though, so there is some conflict here. For now, we have fallback
code for the rendering that keeps broadway working, so we're keeping it
around, but if at any point broadway becomes a problem to keep working
we're going to drop. I don't really forsee this happening at the
moment, but there are no guarantees.

--
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com
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