LWN: Comments on "Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4"

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

nix — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 21:03:04 +0000

Er, you seriously don't realise the advantages of interspersed quoting?

You don't spend much time on development mailing lists, I suspect. (Or you're a troll using this as an excuse not to bother actually responding to any of Olav's substantive points. Well, OK, we *know* you're a troll.)

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

nix — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 20:55:36 +0000

The "once you have x.y+1 you cannot downgrade to x.y" is true for more or less all shared libraries, modulo those very rare ones that have very harsh API/ABI rules that state that x.y.* have an unchanging API/ABI and don't even add symbols.

What Gtk is proposing is a new major version every few months. Given that you can't load two major versions of things like Gtk into the same process (or at any rate not without *at least* decorating every symbol with the version of the shared library and using massive macro trickery to hide it from developers), and that they're also breaking API that often... it seems an utterly unworkable recipe for disaster. I can't understand how anyone who's ever maintained any piece of widely used library software could *possibly* propose a scheme this broken. What on earth are they on?!

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

hitmark — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 14:43:59 +0000

Ah yes, the ever lovely "lets take the whole, break it into parts, and make it massively bothersome to respond" technique.

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

mjthayer — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 06:10:10 +0000

> Oh, because everything Red Hat ever maintained has a wildly unstable ABI and changes its soname every six months! Like glibc!

Slightly late reaction here, but I was just wondering whether this actually differs much from the glibc ABI and API handling: if I understand right, anything built against Gtk 4.2 will still run on a system with Gtk 4.4 on it, but once you have the development files (I wanted to say "SDK", but I don't think that term is politically correct in a FOSS context) for Gtk 4.4 on your system you can't easily build against Gtk 4.2. And building against an older version of glibc than the one on your system is not a task for the faint of heart, though I suspect you may know more about that than I ever will.

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roc — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 05:13:40 +0000

Mozilla doesn't really have the manpower to devote a lot of it to supporting Linux desktop.

Part of it is that what manpower they do have is volunteers from distros (Red Hat) and elsewhere who want to keep using GTK.

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

mclasen@redhat.com — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 19:31:55 +0000

We've started to write a more detailed proposal here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK+/Lifecycle

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

ovitters — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 08:46:09 +0000

Ah, thanks. Actually rather obvious once I reread your original comment!

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

micka — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 08:44:18 +0000

The cause is my incorrect and unclear language probably.
I should have said "many apps will continue to require XWayland".

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

ovitters — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 08:36:58 +0000

> But I'm certain many apps will retain the need for an X compatbility shim.

Could you explain why (as I am curious/confused/don't see this need)?

Why doesn't everyone do what GNOME wants to do?

ovitters — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 08:31:19 +0000

> So would you like to rebut any of my actual points?

Discuss is more than enough. I've already responded various times in this article and my opinion is still the same: I don't think they've thought this out and it seems very confusing. I do understand what they're after, but think they would need a different approach. But it is better to just let them discover and figure out the implications of this. Once they understand what won't work anymore, then they can come up with a better plan to achieve what they're after without all the drawbacks this idea has.

Why doesn't everyone do what GNOME wants to do?

PaulWay — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 01:32:22 +0000

OK, so the group is slightly different - the GTK developers are excited. Do you think that this change is good for GNOME? Do you think the GNOME developers are excited about it too?

So would you like to rebut any of my actual points? What makes GTK so fundamentally different from any other software that has to worry about ABIs and APIs and compatibility? What lessons have been learnt from how other projects do things? What are the GTK developers' reasons for making it more difficult for other package maintainers to work with them in the long term?

Thoughts?

Paul

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

DOT — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 22:36:17 +0000

Of course the support window should be longer than 6 months, but that has always been the case. Bugfixes for old Gtk's keep coming in depending on usage within distros. But sure, for most applications the 2-year heartbeat is much more appropriate. Or if you are in maintenance mode: stay on the same old stable version forever.

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Karellen — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 21:25:34 +0000

XFCE. In fact, they recently announced[0] that the main development goal for the next version was to finish the conversion from GTK+2 to GTK+3.

Some projects have other priorities, like new features and bug fixes of their own, instead of chasing a new stable toolkit every 2 years. :-(

[0] http://blog.alteroot.org/articles/2016-04-12/road-to-xfce...

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

johannbg — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 20:21:30 +0000

Fedora did not dont know about opensuse or arch.

I personally would have made things so that they where on rotation cycle when there existed just single default in Fedora if I had been empowered to do so, so one release it would be Gnome the next KDE, the one after that XFCE so on and so fourth, to promote and highlight the community made work on equal terms which would give each sub community the equal opportunity to attract contributors ( and evolve and have healthy competion with each other) but the default ofcourse always had to be Red Hat desktop team's Gnome and it promoted over anything else so Red Hat could certainly over shadow the community's work until Red Hat needed it's products ( which today is called editions since someone made the connection and thought it was too obvious ) in Fedora then Red Hat previous lame excuse for having a single default ( which always had to be Gnome ) was thrown out the door and Red Hat products got born and still those Red Hat products overshadow the community work and products ( Wait a minute did not Fedora already have products? glad you asked yes they did and they where and still are called spins ), heck even KDE community got kicked to the curb in an attempt becoming a ( plasma ) product at the same time as the other "official" products were born.

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

ebassi — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 18:35:56 +0000

The structured logging API can use systemd, but it's not strictly required; there is both a configure time and a run time check to detect if systemd is available.

There's no API break either, because the existing API is rebased on top of the new one, with graceful degradation.

See bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=744456

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

micka — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 13:29:17 +0000

>it also raises the question if distribution are continuously revisiting that default as things evolve

I don't know if it's continuous, but there was this study for debian jessie :
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Requalification/Jessie

Also, I don't know if other distributions do it.

Why doesn't everyone do what GNOME wants to do?

micka — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 13:18:39 +0000

> Qt make new ABI/API incompatible version

Do you mean, like Qt3, Qt4, Qt5 ? Or do you mean for point versions ?

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

micka — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 13:08:09 +0000

I think it would be a nice thing to have those run on wayland without XWayland.
That may happen for some of them. It may even be possible that it motivates one or two authors to update their otherwise stable program (even if its as probable as it would happen with a change of toolkit).
But I'm certain many apps will retain the need for an X compatbility shim.

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niner — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 12:43:55 +0000

But why did you stick with GTK then? There has been a (to my knowledge working) Qt port of Mozilla and Qt provides not only support for multiple platforms but also much better API stability.

I get that the large organizations behind Mozilla, Eclipse or LibreOffice have the manpower to keep up with GTK, but why would they choose to do so??

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

johannbg — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 12:40:17 +0000

Distributions defaulting to Gnome did so way before that which bets the question why as in what made majority of distributions default to Gnome back in the day and it also raises the question if distribution are continuously revisiting that default as things evolve or if they have just accepted things as is and Gnome will always be default despite whatever controversy changes they are making.

Like for now it seems that gtk folks are giving glib structured logging with journal [1] which may or may not break API and add an0 dependency on libsystemd ( depending how they implement that ) and or application developers they themselves might start adding hard dependency on libsystemd as an result of that, which probably will instigate some discussions in distribution which aren't using systemd and or are shipping multiple init systems like Debian and Gentoo.

1. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/3537

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zdzichu — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 12:19:13 +0000

No one uses Gtk 4, either. But we are not discussing present state, but near future.

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roc — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 09:22:25 +0000

I'd be surprised if Firefox switches. It would be a lot of work.

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roc — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 09:16:29 +0000

It's not easy for Firefox to follow GTK versions, but it does need to stay up to date.

For example Firefox does GTK theme drawing for HTML form elements, which is good because Web content can look like other application content, but it's hard because GTK keeps changing theming APIs.

When new kinds of input arrive you generally need the latest GTK to use them. E.g. Firefox couldn't get touch input until we switched to GTK3.

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

juliank — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 09:15:47 +0000

Right? The only reason to write GTK+ apps is to have them integrate perfectly into GNOME. With that model, if you use the stable release, it's gone - You could just use Qt instead which is much easier to work with...

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roc — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 09:12:54 +0000

flussence was just being snarky.

XUL includes a few different things: some non-standard CSS properties to help with UI layout, some XML elements to represent widgets not supported by HTML, and some DOM APIs to facilitate building desktop apps. Most of the CSS properties and XML elements have been superseded by better, standardized alternatives. Some of the DOM APIs have too, and for the rest there are often not-standardized but better APIs out there (developed for FirefoxOS or Electron or whatever ... we've learned a lot about Web API design over the past 15 years). So XUL is almost entirely obsolete and needs to go away, and is going away ... slowly.

But at a lower level, Gecko depends on a platform toolkit for things like native windows, clipboard, input events, etc.

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

ebassi — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 09:12:41 +0000

> KDE went off the rails with KDE4 at about the same time when GNOME went off the rails with GNOME3.

What?

KDE 4 was first released in 2008. GNOME 3 was first released in 2011. The first concrete design work for GNOME 3 started in late 2009.

> And now I actually see more of Ubuntu Unity than GNOME.

That's likely because the Ubuntu installed base is pretty high, compared to other Linux distributions, and it was high even when Ubuntu was using GNOME as the default UX.

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juliank — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 08:59:01 +0000

> Perhaps GTK should be renamed to GST (Gnome Shell Toolkit), and the original GTK left as is for 3rd party apps.

But: Gnome Shell uses Clutter, not really much GTK...

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

ovitters — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 08:15:49 +0000

> Thus they are underhandedly complaining that they can't get traction for their ideas with the distro maintainers,

Almost everything you claim is made up. Even more so, you can easily Google your claims and see that you're making things up.

1. We communicate extensively with distributions. E.g. I'm on the release team mainly to just follow feeedback and communicate.
2. We have e.g. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/distributor-list/. Before making changes we usually reach out.
3. I spent a huge amount of time clarifying and refuting the incorrect statements made about GNOME in the Debian systemd discussion.

> RH (and apparently Canonical in this instance)

FYI, Canonical went their own way various years ago. It is called Unity, maybe you want to research this a bit.

> keep in mind that Gnome is upstream vis a vis distros

I don't even get what you're talking about.

> Gnome involved people (hello Pennington) founded Freedesktop to bend the distros (and other DEs) to their will.

It was across desktop environments and not even limited to desktop environments. Freedesktop is also about coordinating with non-desktop environments. One example is https://mail.gnome.org/archives/wm-spec-list/ which for historical reasons is still at mail.gnome.org. You can easily see non-desktop environment developers responding there.

It's easy to claim stuff like "evil companies", "they're bad", etc. But you're bullshitting.

Why doesn't everyone do what GNOME wants to do?

tuna — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 08:13:46 +0000

"I'm not sure how Qt and KDE handle adding new features or changing the API and ABI, but I think it would be very instructive to discuss it."

Qt make new ABI/API incompatible version. Also, since Qt has way more stuff in it than GTK+ they also deprecate and remove stuff in the point versions (like QtWebKit).

Why doesn't everyone do what GNOME wants to do?

ovitters — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 08:03:33 +0000

> Because I think the real mistake that Allison and the other GNOME leaders that were apparently all "... excited about this plan"

That's not what was said. If I quote:
"Everyone present for the discussion was excited about this plan"

So GTK+ developers are excited about this

A bit later:
"We will need to have discussions about this with distributors and, particularly, with the GNOME release team."

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Cyberax — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 07:52:23 +0000

No, they aren't.

So basically, Mozilla has HTML5 engine and XUL layout engines. Both use the same underlying abstract rendering layer which is implemented for multiple platforms.

XUL engine by itself doesn't draw anything - it's just a layout system built on XML. They are now simply replacing it with HTML5.

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krake — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 07:49:29 +0000

I interpreted flussence comment to mean they are replacing their current abstraction layer.

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Cyberax — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 07:33:05 +0000

They already have an abstraction layer. Porting to another toolkits/platforms is a lot of work, but it's not terribly complicated. Just mostly pointless.

For example, there was a port of Firefox to Qt.

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krake — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 07:08:12 +0000

But does that mean they will be having a new abstraction or are they going to have each platform's UI done totally separately?

And doesn't that mean they are at this point in the best position to evaluate other options? E.g. using XCB directly, or EFL, etc.

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krake — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 07:05:32 +0000

Then I would assume that it is (a) easy to use something else and (b) not needing to follow the most recent release in this new scheme.

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Cyberax — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 04:09:57 +0000

The custom drawing for widgets is not going away. GTK is still used only for low-level rendering.

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

Cyberax — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 04:07:21 +0000

That's mostly because KDE went off the rails with KDE4 at about the same time when GNOME went off the rails with GNOME3.

And now I actually see more of Ubuntu Unity than GNOME.

Why doesn't everyone do what GNOME wants to do?

PaulWay — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 23:23:43 +0000

This is the question that struck me when considering Allison's post: why aren't more projects doing this? Is GNOME the first to discover this need for progress? How do other projects handle the constant need to add new features and change interfaces?

Because I think the real mistake that Allison and the other GNOME leaders that were apparently all "... excited about this plan" have made is in thinking that somehow they have reached new, uncharted territory and they are boldly leading the way into the future of software design. I think a lot of people - myself included - are looking at this simply as another project wandering off into its own myopic world and not caring about anyone else.

The GNU/Linux kernel is developed with a very specific mandate not to break userspace: API and ABI decisions are often pushed back, rethought, and developed over years of reworking simply to make sure no program using the kernel breaks without a very good reason. Many other projects do this, and the Kernel is an example of exactly how well this can be done. I'm not sure how Qt and KDE handle adding new features or changing the API and ABI, but I think it would be very instructive to discuss it.

The other aspect of this is: what is this project, now 17 years old, doing that is now so fundamentally new and different that they must break things (or at least cannot guarantee that they won't) every six months? How is it possible that there is so much new territory there? Why would compatibility be so difficult?

To me the answers to those questions are in the history of GNOME 3, which was not just 'new' and 'different' but was a radical step away from what many people wanted - so much so that it spawned one direct fork and several other new window managers based on the old principles. Many projects have forked in such a way, but most for bad reasons. That is not a track record that makes the GNOME user base confident that we are being heard - or even cared about. This new development will not only put users offside (as applications fail, look different or stagnate due to API incompatibilities) but developers as well.

And that's not a good thing.

Have fun,

Paul

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flussence — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 23:20:41 +0000

XUL's being removed from Firefox, as it turned out to be a major obstacle in making the browser more like Chrome.

Lortie: Gtk 4.0 is not Gtk 4

krake — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 23:16:09 +0000

> Gnome involved people (hello Pennington) founded Freedesktop to bend the distros (and other DEs) to their will.

Most of the work on Freedesktop.org has been done in cooperation of GNOME and KDE.

Some spec originate in one community, some in the other and through discussion and collaboration arrived at the state that either could support in future versions additional to their custom solution they had been using till then.

With more DEs having dedicated developers and maintainers this has involved even further, sometimes newer DEs cooperating on a new thing with one of the older, etc.