Re: [Pan-devel] GTK+3 Support

[Duncan]

Yclept Nemo posted on Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:49:39 -0400 as excerpted:

> What's the plan for GTK+3 support? Maintain GTK+2 and GTK+3 versions
> simultaneously (I notice HAVE_GTK for GTK+3 in config.h), or rip out all
> GTK+2 specific code in preference of using GTK+3.?

Pan has had both gtk2/gtk3 support for some time, and AFAIK (I'm a long 
time list regular and often play the pan historian role, but I'm not a 
dev), there's no plans to change that any time soon.  Pan has 
traditionally been reasonably conservative with its version requirements, 
supporting long-outdated versions in ordered to be buildable/runnable on 
the widest assortment of platforms possible, and I don't believe that's 
likely to change.  (We have a list-regular and git-pan builder/user that 
runs pan on OSX, for instance.  Their macports or whatever it is has a 
bunch of older libraries and AFAIK builds with a gcc forked back when it 
was still gpl2, so when something breaks in git for older packages, he 
tends to complain and we know about and the devs try to fix it reasonably 
rapidly, certainly before a release.)

That said, there will likely come a time, hopefully several years from 
now for me personally as well, given (as a kde desktop user but one who 
seems to be standardizing on quite a few gtk2 apps) I don't have gtk3 
installed at all, only gtk2, and /I/ don't plan on changing that in the 
immediate future either, that pretty much everyone has moved on and pan 
will drop gtk2 support as well, much as there's very few gtk/gnome-1 apps 
still around today.  But best I can project, that point may well be 2-5 
years out, and beyond 5 years is a VERY long time to predict in the FLOSS 
environment, so who can say what'll happen at that point.

FWIW, I'm as concerned about the upcoming X/wayland conversion and what 
that might mean for a whole /slew/ of apps including pan, as I am about 
the whole gtk2/gtk3 thing, which looks to be a rather small event in 
comparison.  That has the potential to be *REAL* interesting.  From here 
I'd say there's been no FLOSS event even CLOSE to that size since the 
upgrade to glibc5 back before the turn of the century (and before I 
switched to Linux as well, so for me, it could be near the magnitude of 
my MS-servantware/freedomware-Linux switch, tho without the personal 
servantware-to-freedomware implications of that switch, just many of the 
same technical platform switch implications, at least at the GUI level).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman