Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/10/03/23:03:54
On Sun, Oct 4, 2015 at 2:48 AM, <gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 4 Oct 2015, Evan Foss (evanfoss AT gmail DOT com) [via
> geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> Igor2 is off working on something using SDL because it is maintained
>> but has a slower release cycle. The logical reason being that we don't
>> really care about new gtk functionality but we have to burn time
>> fixing things for each major gtk release.
>
>
> SPOLIER ALERT: I am not talking about gschem or pcb here; I don't say any of
> the geda tools should or should not use gtk. I just share my personal
> opinion about using gtk in general. I won't respond to text that ignores
> this.
>
> Yes, I think GTK is a bad idea long term (for any application), and it's not
> qt that'd solve this. My resoning goes:
Google would agree with you they dumped it.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/03/12/0147256/google-to-replace-gtk-with-its-own-aura-in-chrome
> - When gtk changes API, sooner or later projects using gtk have to change
> too, even if there's no real reason for the change; this often involves not
> only technical code change, but gui redesign on the app side. To me it seems
> like a waste to do major changes on the GUI not because the app needs it but
> gtk needs it.
>
> - I know I am not a typical user, but I hate eye-candy changes, and majority
> of such a gtk change is usually about that. So this is changing the GUI of
> an applicaiton just that it looks more modern while I'm still trying to do
> the same job as 10 years ago. I don't say the GUI or any other part should
> be frozen just because I got used to it, but I do say the desire for the
> change should be coming from the application not from a GUI toolkit change.
>
> - GTK doesn't look native on anything else than gnome. Most other toolkits
> have the same property: native only on one or on a few systems. So using
> anything else doesn't make this worse or better. (If an app wants to look
> native on multiple platforms, it needs multiple native GUI frontends, one
> for each platform.)
MATE is actively developed and based on GTK2 (migrating slowly to
GTK3) because the users and developers like GNOME2 and hated using
OpenGL for everything the way GNOME3 does.
I said earlier on the geda-developers list that a good blue sky
project would be giving geda a way to have multiple GUI's like pcb
does with hid.
> - GTK is huge: gtk+2.0 is over 368k sloc. For the comparison, pcb-rnd trunk/
> is about 160k and geda-gaf is below 120k. So having buttons and menus costs
> more code than the two tools combined - not counting the dependencies of
> GTK.
>
> - Future of GTK doesn't look good either: gtk+3.0 is 672k sloc. I don't
> believe version 4 will be smaller than version 2, even if it'd be about
> cleanup.
>
> - GTK brings other stuff like glib. I know my opinion is being extreme
> again, but I don't think glib is a good idea in its current form. I also
> believe it did nothing good for pcb or geda. Debian says gtk 2.0 also
> depends on libs like glib, gdk, pango, atk, cairo.
>
> - Portability; GTK and other major toolkits are usually ported to a few
> popular systems by the maintainers so projects don't need to worry about
> that, which is a good point. But if you have a system it is not ported to,
> you'll probably have hard time porting it. Especially if you need to also
> port the dependencies... Does GTK work well on tablets?
>
>
> For my own amusement I'm working on a small UI toolkit based on SDL2. The
> SDL project doesn't have major API changes as often as gtk, and is much
> smaller. It is ported to at least as many systems as gtk is - inlcuding
> Linux, modern BSD systems (e.g. osx), windows, android and iOS. Looking at
> video/, porting to a new system doesn't seem to be very hard either. SDL
> doesn't bring excess dependencies.
>
> With the SDL based toolkit, eventually I will have an SDL based HID for
> pcb-rnd. I believe it will be faster than the gtk hid, it will be more
> customizable (GUI layout will be data, not code), and more portable (windows
> cross compiles will be much simpler). It'll take a long time to finish the
> toolkit, tho.
>
> Regards,
>
> Igor2
>
>
>
--
Home
http://evanfoss.googlepages.com/
Work
http://forge.abcd.harvard.edu/gf/project/epl_engineering/wiki/
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