[Sugar-devel] Moving to GTK3 and GObject Introspection

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Daniel Drake's message of Fri Aug 05 15:04:49 +0200 2011:

> No comments yet.

The plan looks good in general, thanks for taking the time to draft and
elaborate!

It might be worth pointing out that the list in "Proposed plan of
action" contains quite a few actions that can happen in parallel, not
just in the particular order given.

As mentioned in #sugar, I'd love to see a GTK 2 based version of Sugar
without hippo-canvas (this seems to match your plan). Without
hippo-canvas, we can finally do automated UI tests. I already have a few
other missing pieces in my drawer, but they weren't too useful with the
Home View still based on hippo-canvas.

The value of the automated tests is that they can reduce the risk of the
Gnome 3 port introducing regressions. I'd expect them to be quite
limited at first (no simulation of external storage devices, no multiple
instances collaborating, etc.) but still good as a band-aid.


> 1. Do we use the python module table magic so that both GTK2 and GTK3
> versions of sugar toolkit can have the name "sugar", or do we give the
> GTK3 version a new name (e.g. sugar1)?

I don't think that would be useful. AFAICT there need to be major
textual changes anyway.


> 2. Are people happy with labelling components with version number 1.0
> once they have a stable GTK3 port? The 1.0 tag was generally agreed
> upon when this was last discussed a while back, but it would be good
> to verify current opinion.

If we make it clear that it's 1.0 of the technology preview / proof of
concept and not of what Sugar wants to be (a learning platform with
Collaboration and reflection etc.), that's fine with me.


> 3. I'm toying with the idea of coordinating a hackfest for this at, or
> immediately after, Sugarcamp Paris next month. The result would be
> that sugar-toolkit-1.0 gets released at the end of the hackfest,
> including GTK2 and GTK3 support. What do people think about that?

I'd like us to work on other issue first. Topics that come to my mind
include design changes for touch screen support and extending the
Journal (e.g. finally adding the Action View). Of course that doesn't
mean a Gnome 3 porting hack session wouldn't be welcome, just that it is
less of a priority for me (because there's already one happening right
now in Berlin).


> 4. Is a one year transition period OK? This would start when a GTK3
> port of sugar-toolkit is declared stable and working, would freeze the
> GTK2 version of sugar-toolkit, and then after 1 year the GTK2 version
> would be deleted.

Only time can tell. It will depend a lot on the details. However given
the usual schedules (with a unit of school years) at deployments, I
would expect that we need to keep the GTK 2 version of sugar-toolkit
around for more than one year. But since you plan for it to be
unmaintained, I wonder what would actually happen after that time. I
don't think we should be removing git repositories or old release
tarballs.

Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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