Not sure if that helps with reducing the number of support version but I think the GTK version can be restricted by the GTK versions used by the main stream Linux distributions (IMHO Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian) which are still "supported" by their community.
Best regards, Lars 2014-10-07 17:15 GMT+02:00 Aleksandar Kurtakov <akurt...@redhat.com>: > On behalf of SWT team (committers working on GTK port): > > The addition of the GTK+ 3.x based implementation of SWT which is now > officially supported along with the GTK+ 2.x implementation means that the > range of supported GTK+ versions has now grown pretty large and is in fact, > continuing to grow with every release (for each x.y+1 SWT release, there > are x.y+2 releases of GTK+). However, it is not practically possible for > the current set of committers alone to actually test all these versions > before we make a release. Therefore, we end up "declaring" support for a > huge range of GTK+ versions while the reality is that they are not tested > and verified the way they must be to call them supported. > > Another consequence of this is that constantly having to convert between > old-to-new or vice versa ways of doing things takes all our time, not > allowing for any meaningful new developments or even to keep pace with the > advancements in the platforms. There are two possible ways to improve this > situation from our point of view: > > *) Others start to actively contribute to SWT - help improve the test > suite, get a representative range of test machine variations running the > tests so problems are caught earlier, get rid of dead bits from the > code-base to ease migrations, etc. etc. Many of the tasks don't require any > special OS specific knowledge as many seem to think before trying to help > with SWT. Also, the current committers are more than willing to help new > contributors with guidance and patch reviews as and when needed. > > *) Actively limiting the number of supported GTK+ versions - continually > adapting to newer versions is really stretching the current resources. So, > we end up with neither the old nor the new versions being in a really good > shape. To overcome this limitation, it's needed that both groups of people > (committers and end-users) participate actively as some of the soon to come > changes in GTK+ require major overhaul of certain areas. For example, > GdkColor is being deprecated and GdkRGBA is the new way of doing stuff but > there are changes in too many places and there are huge chances to break > some older versions. If this is not done, properties using GdkColor seem to > no longer have effect/have problems, so it's only a matter of time how long > such changes can be delayed. And this is just one of the examples, there > are > quite a few similar. As a bare minimum, we think that the range of > supported GTK+ versions should not grow until people step up to help > support a broader range. > > An ideal solution would be a combination of both the above approaches - > having more people contributing to SWT + actively dropping support for > older versions of GTK+. > > Please reply to this thread and let us know what your thoughts are. It > would be very useful for us to also know which versions of GTK+ are being > used widely and what is the minimum required version that you need support > for from future releases of SWT (4.5+). > > Alexander Kurtakov > Red Hat Eclipse team > > _______________________________________________ > cross-project-issues-dev mailing list > cross-project-issues-dev@eclipse.org > To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or unsubscribe > from this list, visit > https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/cross-project-issues-dev >
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