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I'm very involved with (lately less so, been busy) and IMO you're pretty accurate. Some more details: Replacements for autotools often only handle the simple c

by bkor 11y ago

I'm very involved with (lately less so, been busy) and IMO you're pretty accurate. Some more details: Replacements for autotools often only handle the simple case. Widely known that autotools is difficult, however, the replacements cannot do what the GTK autotools is used for at this moment. For the compiler: I think the Microsoft compiler is holding us back? Further there are two important parts: glib is used almost everywhere, so you have to be very strict in what you accept. GTK+ should be more easy going. They did add that support for (IIRC) automatically freeing variables. Tied to Red Hat is very unfortunate. However good willed, it is better if there is a group of similar sized companies. I'd wish there were more (free software) companies the size of Red Hat.

bjourne 11y ago
Autotools can be replaced. I know because I've done it. :) And so have KDE which replaced it with cmake. But unless you have a redhat.com address, good luck trying to convince the GTK developers that it should be done. It's essentially Red Hat's product and they decide what to do with it. Which makes it very hard for contributors to drive meaningful change which makes few contributors interested -> resource shortage. So if the question is "why does GTK have a resource shortage when Qt does not?" then, imho, that is very easy to answer.
- Nelson69 11y ago
  This is what forks are for, isn't it? If it's that simple, I'd think a fork could pretty easily start to solve some of GTK+'s issues. From my perspective, GTK has been mired for a very very long time. Essentially from its inception it was something that was required for other missions. There have been tons of volunteers and people working on it but I'm not sure how much of that was because they needed it vs because that's what they love to do. I also have some suspicions that certain UXy/visual type problems just don't seem to be good fits for the bazaar model, all my evidence would be tied to GNOME, GTK, and GIMP for the most part so I could see how I might be wrong. If it's being held back by some Redhat folks that are paid to maintain it because Redhat went all in with it decades back, a fork could potentially revitalize it.

by bkor 11y ago

bjourne 11y ago

Autotools can be replaced. I know because I've done it. :) And so have KDE which replaced it with cmake. But unless you have a redhat.com address, good luck trying to convince the GTK developers that it should be done. It's essentially Red Hat's product and they decide what to do with it. Which makes it very hard for contributors to drive meaningful change which makes few contributors interested -> resource shortage. So if the question is "why does GTK have a resource shortage when Qt does not?" then, imho, that is very easy to answer.

Nelson69 11y ago
This is what forks are for, isn't it? If it's that simple, I'd think a fork could pretty easily start to solve some of GTK+'s issues. From my perspective, GTK has been mired for a very very long time. Essentially from its inception it was something that was required for other missions. There have been tons of volunteers and people working on it but I'm not sure how much of that was because they needed it vs because that's what they love to do. I also have some suspicions that certain UXy/visual type problems just don't seem to be good fits for the bazaar model, all my evidence would be tied to GNOME, GTK, and GIMP for the most part so I could see how I might be wrong. If it's being held back by some Redhat folks that are paid to maintain it because Redhat went all in with it decades back, a fork could potentially revitalize it.