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The Gimp devs taking nine years to port from Gimp Toolkit 2 to Gimp Toolkit 3 kinda invalidates all claims about porting between Qt versions being too hard, doe

The Gimp devs taking nine years to port from Gimp Toolkit 2 to Gimp Toolkit 3 kinda invalidates all claims about porting between Qt versions being too hard, doesn't it?

bitwize 6y ago
GTK hasn't been the Gimp Toolkit in years. It's much more the GNOME Toolkit these days.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Yes, siding with you on this. Biggest fault of the Gtk/GNOME ecosystem these days is a small bunch of atrociously toxic people centering around RedHat shouting "Nobody besides me works on this, and that! So sit tightly, and shut up with your feedback!," while completely forgetting that it was them who scared off, and trolled out most normal people out of the GNOME community, including some of the best devs they had.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    Can you elaborate on this? Who was scared off, and how/why was this done?
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      There is a lengthy history of general toxicity, gatekeeping attitudes and the like in the Gnome dev community, dating back to the early 2.x days. This extensive comment https://dot.kde.org/comment/60560#comment-60560 https://dot.kde.org/comment/60560#comment-60560 dates back to 2003, and back then RedHat wasn't even heavily involved in development (the major corporate sponsors back then were Eazel and Ximian, which are basically unheard of today) but clearly the overall attitude has not changed much since then.
      - cycloptic 6y ago
        That appears to be a completely out-of-context comment about GNOME made on a KDE blog for unclear reasons. But anyway, I looked through most of the links in that comment and I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. There are some heated arguments around technical issues in those mailing list posts, but there are also many positive comments such as this: >If anything, we have to turn the GNOME community around and make this community a tolerant community, and a community of love. I have to say that I am surprised by how well the gnome-love mailing list has taken of, and surprised to see various newcomers to the platform actually writing code and becoming productive. Also, that was quite a long time ago (some posts are from earlier than 2003) and most of those people involved in those threads don't appear to be associated with the project anymore. It certainly seems like they were able to work out some of their process issues in the last 17 years seeing as how the bonobo/orbit parts were dropped entirely.
      - jdub 6y ago
        That's a very, very old "manifesto" that was pasted verbatim into almost every FLOSS news site and mailing list at the time (relevant or not), written by a well known troll and harasser who was removed from multiple FLOSS communities.
    - ldng 6y ago
      To me, it started to go down hill when RedHat hired designers to work on Gnome and they decided Gnome 3 absolutly had to work on tablets. For context, it's the time Google also stopped to rely on metrics and gave the key to designers, and tablets were going to kill both the PC and the laptop. Not to say UX designer are not important, but, IMHO, very good one are rare and stubborn one common place. Not that we devs are any better.
jononor 6y ago
A major reason for not shipping GTK3 port, which was largely completed a long time ago, is that GIMP 2.x has a stable plugins API and GTK2+ is exposed in said API. At the same time there has been other major revamps of the API with changing image processing layer to use GEGL. It was decided to release both breaking changes as GIMP 3.x, instead of breaking first the one, then the other.
jandrese 6y ago
The port from GTK2 to GTK3 isn't even that hard in my experience. It's a lot of typing but for the most part stuff works the same with a few exceptions (like tooltips). It's kind of important too because bugs in Gtk2 aren't getting fixed anymore. I ran into DBUS related issue with Gtk2 and ScrolledWindows in Ubuntu 20 and the dev response was basically "ew, gross, I'm not touching that". Fixing it required me to rewrite the app to use Gtk3 instead.
brnt 6y ago
Is there any technical merit for Gtk at this point?
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I guess being the one that is more GNU/Linux oriented, so that is what most managed languages frameworks bind to (Swing, SWT, GtkSharp, Gtk-rs, Gtkmm, PyGtk,...), specially because of GObject it is relatively easy to generate bindings.
- rebeccaskinner 6y ago
  Maybe it's just familiarity, or I'm out of touch since it's been a few years since I was really evaluating the options, but I find GTK much nicer to work with than Qt. It seems to do better with language bindings too. GTK being a C API seems to make it a lot easier to auto-generate bindings for any language with an FFI. Qt, being both primarily a C++ API, and also with the custom preprocessor and signal/slot nonsense seems like it's much harder to make sensible bindings for.
  - matthiasv 6y ago
    > GTK being a C API seems to make it a lot easier to auto-generate bindings for any language with an FFI. Not only that but as outlined in that article, GObject introspection allows easy integration with most popular dynamic languages (most importantly JS and Python) without the need for specific bindings.
    - CameronNemo 6y ago
      JS and Python are the best Qt bindings, though. GObject helps out with other languages like Rust and Lua.
      - billfruit 6y ago
        QT python bindings were rather confusing with multiple libraries and basically very poor documentation when I checked a couple of years ago. Not to mention QTs java binding also was not a good story.
Iwan-Zotow 6y ago
No, there are a lot of breaking changes beyond 2->3 transition. Basically, everything had changed: toolkit, extensions, styling, icons, theming Devs wanted to do it all at once
- asutekku 6y ago
  Still should not take nine years, even if it is an oss project.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

The Gimp devs taking nine years to port from Gimp Toolkit 2 to Gimp Toolkit 3 kinda invalidates all claims about porting between Qt versions being too hard, doesn't it?

bitwize 6y ago

GTK hasn't been the Gimp Toolkit in years. It's much more the GNOME Toolkit these days.

baybal2 6y ago
Yes, siding with you on this. Biggest fault of the Gtk/GNOME ecosystem these days is a small bunch of atrociously toxic people centering around RedHat shouting "Nobody besides me works on this, and that! So sit tightly, and shut up with your feedback!," while completely forgetting that it was them who scared off, and trolled out most normal people out of the GNOME community, including some of the best devs they had.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on this? Who was scared off, and how/why was this done?
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    There is a lengthy history of general toxicity, gatekeeping attitudes and the like in the Gnome dev community, dating back to the early 2.x days. This extensive comment https://dot.kde.org/comment/60560#comment-60560 https://dot.kde.org/comment/60560#comment-60560 dates back to 2003, and back then RedHat wasn't even heavily involved in development (the major corporate sponsors back then were Eazel and Ximian, which are basically unheard of today) but clearly the overall attitude has not changed much since then.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      That appears to be a completely out-of-context comment about GNOME made on a KDE blog for unclear reasons. But anyway, I looked through most of the links in that comment and I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. There are some heated arguments around technical issues in those mailing list posts, but there are also many positive comments such as this: >If anything, we have to turn the GNOME community around and make this community a tolerant community, and a community of love. I have to say that I am surprised by how well the gnome-love mailing list has taken of, and surprised to see various newcomers to the platform actually writing code and becoming productive. Also, that was quite a long time ago (some posts are from earlier than 2003) and most of those people involved in those threads don't appear to be associated with the project anymore. It certainly seems like they were able to work out some of their process issues in the last 17 years seeing as how the bonobo/orbit parts were dropped entirely.
    - jdub 6y ago
      That's a very, very old "manifesto" that was pasted verbatim into almost every FLOSS news site and mailing list at the time (relevant or not), written by a well known troll and harasser who was removed from multiple FLOSS communities.
  - ldng 6y ago
    To me, it started to go down hill when RedHat hired designers to work on Gnome and they decided Gnome 3 absolutly had to work on tablets. For context, it's the time Google also stopped to rely on metrics and gave the key to designers, and tablets were going to kill both the PC and the laptop. Not to say UX designer are not important, but, IMHO, very good one are rare and stubborn one common place. Not that we devs are any better.

jononor 6y ago

A major reason for not shipping GTK3 port, which was largely completed a long time ago, is that GIMP 2.x has a stable plugins API and GTK2+ is exposed in said API. At the same time there has been other major revamps of the API with changing image processing layer to use GEGL. It was decided to release both breaking changes as GIMP 3.x, instead of breaking first the one, then the other.

jandrese 6y ago

The port from GTK2 to GTK3 isn't even that hard in my experience. It's a lot of typing but for the most part stuff works the same with a few exceptions (like tooltips). It's kind of important too because bugs in Gtk2 aren't getting fixed anymore. I ran into DBUS related issue with Gtk2 and ScrolledWindows in Ubuntu 20 and the dev response was basically "ew, gross, I'm not touching that". Fixing it required me to rewrite the app to use Gtk3 instead.

brnt 6y ago

Is there any technical merit for Gtk at this point?

pjmlp 6y ago
I guess being the one that is more GNU/Linux oriented, so that is what most managed languages frameworks bind to (Swing, SWT, GtkSharp, Gtk-rs, Gtkmm, PyGtk,...), specially because of GObject it is relatively easy to generate bindings.
rebeccaskinner 6y ago
Maybe it's just familiarity, or I'm out of touch since it's been a few years since I was really evaluating the options, but I find GTK much nicer to work with than Qt. It seems to do better with language bindings too. GTK being a C API seems to make it a lot easier to auto-generate bindings for any language with an FFI. Qt, being both primarily a C++ API, and also with the custom preprocessor and signal/slot nonsense seems like it's much harder to make sensible bindings for.
- matthiasv 6y ago
  > GTK being a C API seems to make it a lot easier to auto-generate bindings for any language with an FFI. Not only that but as outlined in that article, GObject introspection allows easy integration with most popular dynamic languages (most importantly JS and Python) without the need for specific bindings.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    JS and Python are the best Qt bindings, though. GObject helps out with other languages like Rust and Lua.
    - billfruit 6y ago
      QT python bindings were rather confusing with multiple libraries and basically very poor documentation when I checked a couple of years ago. Not to mention QTs java binding also was not a good story.

Iwan-Zotow 6y ago

No, there are a lot of breaking changes beyond 2->3 transition. Basically, everything had changed: toolkit, extensions, styling, icons, theming Devs wanted to do it all at once

asutekku 6y ago
Still should not take nine years, even if it is an oss project.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]