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Testing is not enough. I release an application "today" (and "today" for example is when Gtk 3.4 is released), and six months down the line the Gtk team decide

by awalton 12y ago

Testing is not enough. I release an application "today" (and "today" for example is when Gtk 3.4 is released), and six months down the line the Gtk team decides to release Gtk 3.6 which breaks just about every application that has a GtkTable. As an application developer, I believe I have a right to be pissed. How do I file a grievance? I go to the GNOME bug tracker to find my bug. CLOSED: WONTFIX - we don't care, our solution is you port to GtkGrid. Doesn't matter to us that you now have to bifurcate your codebase to work with people still running Gtk 3.0 or 3.2, or choose to ship your own built version of Gtk 3.4 with your application. Fuck you, application developer. What do I do to mitigate the impact? Well, I have to spin an emergency release of my application, despite the fact that no other code might have changed, just because the Gtk team decided that breaking ABI was no longer a concern for them. Now multiply this for basically every Gtk cycle from 3.4 to 3.1(3/4) and you realize the problem.

oliwarner 12y ago
I think you're conflating "what's released and out there" with "what's being used or distributed". I'm saying you can test on the versions distributions are actually shipping (and the ones they're about to be using). In a lot of distributions you can rely on that staying stable for a period of time. If your application depends on an older GTK library the solution is simple: depend on that version or ship it with your application. This is pretty unusual in the Linux world but old hat for Windows developers where you can only really depend on Win32; and for anything else your installer makes sure it's present. And finally, for the third time, I'll state that I'm not saying there aren't legitimate issues with how GTK+ is developed. There clearly are... I'm just saying that some of the things Morten wrote show issues in their own development process as much as anything else.

by awalton 12y ago

oliwarner 12y ago

I think you're conflating "what's released and out there" with "what's being used or distributed". I'm saying you can test on the versions distributions are actually shipping (and the ones they're about to be using). In a lot of distributions you can rely on that staying stable for a period of time. If your application depends on an older GTK library the solution is simple: depend on that version or ship it with your application. This is pretty unusual in the Linux world but old hat for Windows developers where you can only really depend on Win32; and for anything else your installer makes sure it's present. And finally, for the third time, I'll state that I'm not saying there aren't legitimate issues with how GTK+ is developed. There clearly are... I'm just saying that some of the things Morten wrote show issues in their own development process as much as anything else.