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I'm talking about the change from Gtk1.0 to Gtk2.0 (or that's what I remember mostly). I gave up on Gentoo around 2001 or so. Things were better when I left,

I'm talking about the change from Gtk1.0 to Gtk2.0 (or that's what I remember mostly). I gave up on Gentoo around 2001 or so. Things were better when I left, but there was still breakage whenever I did a world-update. I had fallen into the lazy habit of not updating often enough which contributed to the problem, but still, the promise was that all you had to do was to do a world-update and everything would work fine. Maybe it does now, but I remember having to run a crippled system for a couple of weeks at a time, while trying to sort through the numerous broken packages. I had used many different desktops including XFCE. They were all pretty good and completely flexible under Gentoo, as the Desktop designers had intended. That part was fine, but the underlying Gtk libraries were a complete PITA whenever there were large changes.

micampe 12y ago
Both Gentoo and GTK2 were released in 2002.
kelnos 12y ago
I'm still a bit confused. The 1.x to 2.x transition was intended to be a breaking change (hence the major version bump). I don't see how you had application issues during that, as 1.x and 2.x were parallel-installable, and apps had to make a conscious decision to upgrade. I don't recall the stability of the 2.0.x series, though: it's possible they didn't get things right and were still making breaking changes even though it was the stable series. I don't remember that being a problem, but I'll admit my memory of that period isn't perfect. I do remember some app developers prematurely upgrading and releasing versions that depended on early development releases of 2.0 (and later, on the 2.1.x unstable series), which often did cause breakages. But that was really the app developer's fault for depending on versions that made no API/ABI guarantees.
- aceperry 12y ago
  Sorry, I don't recall the particulars since it was a long time ago. But believe me, there were lots of problems with the libraries. I still cringe whenever I have to deal with a Gtk library.

micampe 12y ago

Both Gentoo and GTK2 were released in 2002.

kelnos 12y ago

I'm still a bit confused. The 1.x to 2.x transition was intended to be a breaking change (hence the major version bump). I don't see how you had application issues during that, as 1.x and 2.x were parallel-installable, and apps had to make a conscious decision to upgrade. I don't recall the stability of the 2.0.x series, though: it's possible they didn't get things right and were still making breaking changes even though it was the stable series. I don't remember that being a problem, but I'll admit my memory of that period isn't perfect. I do remember some app developers prematurely upgrading and releasing versions that depended on early development releases of 2.0 (and later, on the 2.1.x unstable series), which often did cause breakages. But that was really the app developer's fault for depending on versions that made no API/ABI guarantees.

aceperry 12y ago
Sorry, I don't recall the particulars since it was a long time ago. But believe me, there were lots of problems with the libraries. I still cringe whenever I have to deal with a Gtk library.