How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#101

Post by aceperry » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 7:01 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #98

aceperry wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 th…

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.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#102

Post by stefantalpalaru » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 12:11 PM UTC

awalton wrote: post #99

catern wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, just relicense your application under the GPL. You're getting these libraries for free. If you're not at all willing to contribute back, then you're obviously not the target audience.

If you check Gtk+'s history, I have contributed back on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, convincing the people who write my paychecks, VMware, to contribute Workstation and Player to the Open Source community seems to be a pretty big stretch.

"(1) If you statically link against an LGPL'd library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application." - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic

So there you have it. Link statically against the LGPL library and package the object files of your commercial application.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#103

Post by axilmar » Mon, Jul 07, 2014, 1:13 PM UTC

icefox wrote: post #50

jbk wrote: post #12

This state of Gtk sad, but I'm really glad we (VLC) moved to Qt, a few years ago (2006), before many applications did the switch, and when it was an unpopular move. Before that time, we were using WxWidgets and had many issues, notably with Unicode and Windows support. WxWidget APIs and behaviors were changing too much between releases (even minor ones). When we moved, we were in the early Qt 4.1/4.2 days, and most V…

Around that time I worked for Trolltech and got a good view of how that project was run. The trolls took compatibility very seriously. From devs that were running KDE 3 using the current nightly build of Qt 3 to swapping out the Qt library of various Qt applications with the next Qt release to find any regressions ourselves, keeping things working was important. Dogfooding with KDE, internal tools etc was expected by…

Nice, but they didn't follow their advice in the case of creating parent-less widgets up to Qt4.

I.e. in Qt3 and previous versions, creating a parent-less widget resulted in a window frame being created. Why was that? If I am creating a button I do not want a window frame around it. I am going to insert the button to another widget later.

Thank God they fixed that in Qt4 and later versions.