Last year in September 2021 I wrote this list asking about the status of the Gtk3 widgetset implementation for Lazarus. The consensus at the time seemed to indicate that the package was still incomplete and had no maintainer.
Over the past few days, I have been attempting to add Gtk3 widgetset support to a few upcoming library projects I will soon release. As someone with a lot of experience in the areas of general programming, object pascal programming, code library design, and importantly the inner workings of the Lazarus WS (widgetset) abstraction layers for a few different backends, I have this to say. The design of the Gtk3 widgetset backend for Lazarus is fundamentally a bad design and unnecessarily difficult to work with. I can provide specifics about all the problems I see with it in a follow up message if anyone cares to know more, but I am more interested and motivated to get an answer to a burning question that I hope someone can answer. My question is: After 11 years of the Gtk3 release by the Gnome Foundation, and the unmaintained status of Gtk2 by the same foundation, when are we within the Lazarus community going to be comfortable going seeing something someone has started, recognize it as a fundamentally bad design, and officially delete it, thereby allowing someone else to start fresh perhaps steering clear of the problems inherited in a prior bad design attempt? I know I will hear people responding to my question with the statement that I could do this if it's something I care about. That is, I could start writing what might consider a proper design of the Gtk3 widgetset for Lazarus. To those people, I would say I have a lot of other projects and problems IRL I am working on at the the moment and don't have the time to start yet another endeavor as big as redesigning and rewriting the Gtk3 widgetset for Lazarus. Sure I can provide a lot of valuable insight as to what is wrong with the current attempt, but don't have the time (my actual health is failing IRL), but it would be foolish for me to try to take over the Gtk3 widgetset at this point. In brief, if anyone out there cares about helping Lazarus and bringing its support for the Linux desktop more up to date with its current underlying toolkit options, I would offer them both encouragement and some guidance as to both what to avoid and what to do that is good. I have a whole bunch of web browser <https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/tutorials/examples/webbrowser/> related source code for Lazarus Gtk3 that I have been sitting on, waiting to publish when Gtk3 support in Lazarus was a bit more mature. I also have a new OpenGL toolkit <https://streamable.com/cv137g> (an example of the source code interface is here <https://gist.github.com/sysrpl/a9740a23abb352dd9f0f1722393d575b>) I want to release with Gtk3 support on Lazarus. I'd like to be able to release this stuff and a lot more before I die.
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