[Sugar-devel] Moving to GTK3 and GObject Introspection

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

Unfortunately, the time has arrived at which we start encountering
problems due to the fact that Sugar has not yet moved to GTK3 and
GObject Introspection.

Namely, if you run a modern distro such as Fedora 15, Read doesn't
work (evince no longer has gtk2 bindings). Also, Browse is broken with
no future (because of Mozilla no longer supporting embedding) and
needs to switch to WebKit, but this first requires us to move to
GTK3/PyGI.

So, I'd like to initiate some movement on this front. We need to
migrate sugar. As a first step, I aim to produce a fairly detailed,
well-argued, and agreed-upon plan on how this could and should happen,
so that if we were to get a number of experienced developers to focus
on such a project for a few days, the project could be executed in
part.

I've spent some time thinking and researching this, and I've already
spoken to a few community members, and here is what I have so far:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3

The key things I've tried to account for are:
 1. Our developer resources are limited, so I'm proposing a path that
stretches us to the least possible extent while taking on this big
project.
 2. We can't break all activities on a "GTK3 changeover day," but
neither can we let unported activities run forever.
 3. Dividing up the work into stages, where Sugar continues to
function as a whole at the end of each stage, is important to make the
task more manageable/realistic.

So, discuss! :)
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3

Comments, agreement, and hate mail much appreciated - I'll refine the
above page based on the discussion that follows.

cheers
Daniel