On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 10:23 AM Owen Taylor <otay...@redhat.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 5:04 AM Emmanuele Bassi via gtk-devel-list > <gtk-devel-list@gnome.org> wrote: > > > > Hi all; > > > > tl;dr: GTK is GTK, not GTK+. The documentation has been updated, and the > > pkg-config file for the future 4.0 major release is now called "gtk4" > > > > over the years, we had discussions about removing the "+" from the project > > name. The "plus" was added to "GTK" once it was moved out of the GIMP > > sources tree and the project gained utilities like GLib and the GTK type > > system, in order to distinguish it from the previous, in-tree version. Very > > few people are aware of this history, and it's kind of confusing from the > > perspective of both newcomers and even expert users; people join the wrong > > IRC channel, the URLs on wikis are fairly ugly, etc. > > Thanks for moving this along! It's good to see the GTK name finally > get less confusing and easier to talk about! > > But to clarify the history, the "+" predates the point when GTK was > moved out of the GIMP tree. Every single version of GTK with publicly > released sources was called GTK+. As I understand it, Peter Mattis > added the + to mark a change from a very early version that was > structured more like Xt/Motif, to a version that had a fuller type > system with inheritance.
To add a little more to this - Elijah Lynn pointed me to an answer he obtained from Peter on the subject - see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/443832/27902 - GTK was the first version of the toolkit used in pre-1.0 versions of the GIMP. At some point, the architectural limitations were revealed and I rewrote and renamed it as GTK+. This too was used in pre-1.0 versions of the GIMP. I don't believe any project outside of the GIMP used GTK-(no-plus). Why a "+" instead of a version number? No reason other than whim. ~ Peter Mattis _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
