[Sugar-devel] Moving to GTK3 and GObject Introspection

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Daniel,

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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.

Something else that came to mind was I know the gtk team is planning
on getting gtk4 [1] out before long (not sure the exact time scale) so
it likely would be worth at least reviewing their plans [3] for that
so we don't choose a particular approach that might disappear again
before long. It doesn't need to be the main part of it but likely
something worthwhile to keep in the back of our minds and it might be
a worthwhile means of getting anything else we need or to ensure they
don't suddenly go HW accell everywhere etc. In the very least they're
aiming for large improvements in touch etc [2]

Peter

[1] https://live.gnome.org/GTK+/Roadmap
[2] https://desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/gtk-4-future-your-favorite-toolkit
[3] https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/GTK2010/RoadmapDiscussion