[Sugar-devel] Moving to GTK3 and GObject Introspection

[Daniel Drake]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 8:11 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> I'd originally thought that refactoring the Sugar API into more
> independent modules would be a necessary part of the effort, just to
> be able to do a more incremental port.  I'd like to see that
> refactoring happen, but I guess it's good that it's not on the
> critical path?

As mixing pygtk/gtk2 and pygi/gtk3 is not possible, splitting into
more modules would be unlikely to help much. For example, if an
activity pulled one one GTK2-ported module and one GTK3-ported module,
it would have to stick with GTK2.

And yes, even though we can't do this on a fine incremental scale, the
great work being done at the desktop summit suggests that indeed it is
not necessary. That work has identified a handful of unanswered
questions, must-be-done-first prerequisites (such as porting the
theme), but after that point it seems like it will not be too
difficult to port entire codebases at a time.

> It seems like you ought to be able to port sugar-the-window-manager
> and sugar-the-library-used-by-activities separately, and run gtk2
> activities under gtk3 window manager and vice-versa.  But maybe
> maintaining that compatibility is just more trouble than it's worth.

Thats exactly the plan documented here:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3

It's also exactly what they've been doing at the desktop summit, and
the experiments so far show that maintaining gtk2 compatibility for
activities for a transition period won't be a drain on resources.

Thanks for your input!
Daniel