When you don't want to do something, you look for thousands of excuses to grab for not carrying out the task, and honestly, I think this is the case of the developers of Xfce with the theme of carrying gtk3 la version 4.12 This Desktop Environment.
The thing start hereWhere Nick schermer begins by saying:
Friends,
We have ported some parts of Xfce to Gtk3 and it is better to stick with Gtk2 in version 4.12. Along with the fact that it is a tremendous amount of work, the resulting applications are visibly slower, they consume more resources and there are almost no advantages (API technically). So for me porting the Xfce kernel to Gtk3 in the current state is, for me a: no-go.
That said, you can still prepare for this to make the change easier in the future.
- Depends on Gtk 2.24.
- Use the new API (compilation with GSEAL) as much as possible and deprecated API.
- In a number of places to use Gtk widgets instead of our own versions.
- Libraries (libxfce4ui and exo) can provide a gtk2 and gtk3 version of the lib.
- Some basic modules (xfce4-appfinder for example) you want, you can compile against gtk3. This allows us to track progress and possibly Gtk3
help finding topics.This will give us more time to move the parts to Gtk3, due to the complexity involved, it will be time consuming, leaving not much space to add new features. Not to mention the fact of carrying (and only port) everything needed for fun outside of the project, at least for me.
It might even be possible to run Gtk3 panel plugins on a Gtk2 panel (externally), as well for freebies that will give you one more migration path.
We've already talked about this a bit on IRC / private, and Jannis and Peter agree with this route. Hopefully others do too, because then we can map the portability parts and work on roadmap 4.12.
More or less this has been the translation of the original message in English. In part I share the idea that, if gtk3 It is not yet as optimized as it should be, and this leads to a problem for the performance of the applications, the development of Xfce should follow on gtk2, but the question is for how long?
gtk2 it will gradually lose support and yes, although it may be a long time, in the end they have to carry Xfce a gtk3. But it is not only the Desktop Environment. Most of the applications used in GNU / Linux and are developed on gtk, they have also started to implement gkt3.
Therefore, I think that the most correct thing would be in some way, to give support or compatibility to gtk3 en Xfce 4.12, even more so considering that by the time this new version comes out, it is possible that gtk is even more advanced.
What do you think?