Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] gtk/gtk2/gtk3 USE flag situation

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On 05/27/2016 04:21 PM, Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Despite it being 2016 and gtk2 pretty much dead, buried and forgotten
> upstream, many applications still support only gtk2, have subtle issues
> with their gtk3 port, or support both, with some of our userbase
> clinging to gtk2 for dubious political or aesthetical reasons.
>
> For the latter cases, despite GNOME teams policy and strong preference
> on not providing a choice and just choosing gtk2 or gtk3 (gtk3 if it's
> working as good as gtk2), some cases exist where the maintainers want
> to provide such choice. In some cases it is understandable for a short
> while during transition, e.g firefox. In other cases, it is purely for
> the sake of providing the choice of working with a deprecated toolkit,
> apparently.
>
> My highly biased essay aside, we need to finally globally agree on what
> we do in this situation. If we allow this choice at all, only for
> special cases, or widespread. And if this choice is provided, how do we
> name the USE flag.
Looking at the gtk-apps I use ...


Firefox with gtk3 is TOFU. UI elements are invisible, Scrollbars are
broken, etc.
The font rendering is hilariously wrong, even more so than gtk2. I'd
call this "late alpha" if I'm in a good mood.
("wrong" ? well, everything else at fontsize ~8-9 is the same as gtk2 at
fontsize 24, and gtk3 at ~32. Which means that the defaults are
literally unreadable because text ends up 3 pixels high. I have no idea
why everything else understands config, and special snowflake has to
guess instead...)

Thunderbird ... oy vey. The new new theme in 45.1 after a new theme in
45 repeats all the problems with font rendering, and it's "flat" because
who needs to know where UI elements are, where they end, or if they are
active/usable. Also fun that *now* it is 'catching up' with the UI
stupidity of Android-4, which is abandoned. Change to have change ... :\

I think Chromium uses their own layer of madness on top of gtk.
Chromium-51 has a tiny URL bar which is not resizable (sizing only
affects the html viewport). It is proportionally smaller than
Chromium-50, so I guess they switched to gtk3 too.


All in all: GTK+-3 looks substantially worse, has wrong font rendering
(which gtk2 already got wrong), and I consider it a strict downgrade
from gtk2. So where I can, when I can, I will aim to keep gtk2 until I
can switch to something that isn't dead upstream or just braindead.

So while I understand that you don't want to support a toolkit that has
no or little support (like qt4, btw, which is abandoned but only about
half the things have been ported to qt5) ... as long as it's not at
feature-parity some users like me will fight for the option to have
usable software. And that means, for now, requiring gtk2 / gtk3 useflags
to allow us to choose the correct version where possible. I don't care
much how it is exposed, I don't consider "force-gtk2" worse than "gtk2"
or "partial-sanity". But it'll take a lot of improvement before you can
consider deprecating gtk2, and crude methods like the suggested
package.use.mask will motivate me to fix the mistake by reverting it.

(I remember fighting with ssuominen over guvcview, he always tried to
remove the last gtk2 version of it, I readded it because otherwise
there's a whole pile of new bad dependencies, he'd remove it again, I
readded it, lots of fun. Let's not play that game too much please ...)


Thanks,

Patrick