The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:58 UTC (Wed) by rathann (subscriber, #50815)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

> We are still source compatible with everything in GNOME 2.

Now that either means something else than I think or is a lie. There are many GNOME 2 applications that no longer compile because you renamed libraries (for example, gnome-media to libgnomemediawhateveristhenewname) and changed APIs and ABIs.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:21 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link] (1 responses)

Gnome 2 applications still compile against the GTK+ 2 et al. libraries, which aren't going anywhere. So, Gnome 2 applications will work just fine in Gnome 3.0/Gnome Shell.

GTK+ 3 breaks API and ABI, of course. The break isn't too dramatic, though, and there are porting guides at the Gnome sites. It should be much easier (and quicker) to port from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 than it was from GTK+ 1 to GTK+ 2.

I hope that answers your question.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

Thank you for the clarification.

I think his question was if Gnome 3 really was "source code compatible" with Gnome 2. It sounded a lot like you were saying it was. He was rightly pointing out that this is not correct.

I had the wrong impression until he called you out.