On 28 December 2014 at 16:32, Morten Welinder <mort...@gnome.org> wrote: > This is the third (fourth) incarnation of a combo box and there is > still opposition to keeping the API stable? That's just crazy.
on the contrary: with a new class you'd be sure that the GtkComboBox widget API is finally "stable" — as in "no changes, except for bug fixes" — which is apparently what you want. > Matthias' awesomeness aside, why would this be the last time? it wouldn't. the only way to declare the whole of GTK "stable" according to your metric of needing to never port anything ever again would be to simply kill off the project, or go in deep maintenance mode, and only do bug fixes that do not require new API. that's the state in which GTK+ 2.24 is, incidentally. as a project, GTK can either add new API and never deprecate anything ever again — thus catering to the people that already have a sizeable code base and don't need to change their UI because of an established user base — but that would be confusing for new developers that come to the API reference and see three different widgets covering 8 overlapping use cases, thus muddling up the developer experience of the whole core platform. or GTK can deprecate older classes when it becomes clear that the maintenance burden they impose is too high, in the face of changing requirements and designs — which imposes maintenance burden on application developers, something that happens basically on every platform anyway. we could introduce delayed or "soft" deprecations: we simply indicate that a widget should not be used for two cycles (i.e. a year), to let the new widget's API take shape and solidify, and then enable the deprecation warnings. I'm sure we can introduce some pre-processor macro that does this work for us. I honestly don't think never deprecating stuff will ever work. ciao, Emmanuele. -- http://www.bassi.io [@] ebassi [@gmail.com] _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
