[CREATE] LGM: Native GTK OS X ?

[John Haltiwanger]

On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 6:43 PM, Jon Nordby <jononor at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
The number of general users who already installed the developer tools
required to run macports is almost negligible. And running through X11 is
dog slow, ugly in the sore thumb sticking out sort of way, and awkward in
terms of the issues Eric already mentioned.

Users should definitely not need to download the 4.7 gb dev tools DVD just
to run Inkscape. An installer for the native GTK is a must.


> --
> Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com
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