[CREATE] LGM: Native GTK OS X ?

[Jon Nordby]

On 7 May 2011 18:00, Peter Linnell <plinnell at scribus.net> wrote:
> On 05/06/2011 04:53 PM, Schrijver wrote:
>>
>> At the LGM, here’s something I would be interested in if the different
>> developers of projects could get together and talk about: how can you all
>> help to make the OSX GTK port as good as possible? Right now Gimp and
>> Inkscape are not using the native port of GTK, but the X11 version. What are
>> the bottlenecks? How can they be solved?
>>
>> gEdit now ships with native GTK. Of course, it’s a much more simple
>> program.
>> A larger program that implements the native GTK port is Ardour, a digital
>> audio workstation. It’s pretty nifty!
>> Both also make use of native OS X shortcuts and the OS X menu bar.
>> These really are essential. To make Inkscape accessible, for example, I
>> should be able to do command - c from the beginning…
>>
>> I know that developing for OS X can feel off from a FLOSS perspective,
>> since apple’s business tactics are very far from floss ideals. But at the
>> same time, if reaching design professionals is important, than developing
>> for the Mac is crucial…
>
> I do not think it has anything to with Apple's business practices. The real
> issue is GTK was not originally designed to be cross platform in the way the
> Qt was.
>
> Therefore, porting it to non-Unix platforms is non-trivial.
>
How is the way GTK was originally designed any issue (that was over 10
years ago) any issue? The upstream Gtk code can already be ran on OSX
and Windows natively. There is little to no need for any porting. The
issue is that the native version for OSX is not widely deployed. There
are no binary packages for it being distributed, and very few of the
project make their own. The situation for x11 version is only slightly
better because it can be built easily using macports.

-- 
Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com