Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> As I only recently took up building emacs for myself again, I can tell
>> you when I saw the choices for toolkit configuration, my reaction was
>> (a) how is no toolkit a viable option, and (b) who is using a window
>> manager based on the Motif or Lucid toolkits these days?
>
> For Motif, CDE (dtwm) and mwm users.  As for Lucid, no one, because the
> Lucid tookit is internal to Emacs.
>
> But to be fair, GNOME's window manager isn't based on GTK either, and
> uses its own "Shell Toolkit".


Like others in this thread, I don't use the menu-bar, toolbar,
scroll-bars etc, so toolkit seems somewhat irrelevant (I have to do an
M-x version to see which one I'm using!). I build using lucid as that
seemed like a better choice than gtk and I use xfce rather than gnome as
my desktop environment (and sometimes stumpwm).

I think one of the defining features of the GNU Linux desktop is the
wide variety and available choices wrt desktop environments. It really
doesn't matter what toolkit your window manager users except with
respect to the number of toolkits and libraries you have to install on
your system. 

I suspect a part of the decision regarding which toolkit to build emacs
with for various distros probably relates to minimising the number of
toolkits to install. As Gnome seems to be the current 'default', gtk is
already installed, so will likely be a preferred choice unless some
other compelling reason is given.

With Fedora now shipping with Wayland as default and the recent
announcement regarding nvidia driver licensing and support for nvidia
under wayland, I suspectg we will see a significant growth in
distributions defaulting to wayland and wanting to reduce/remove
dependency on X. 

One factor which will likely come into play if we changed the default
toolkit is theming. I've noticed that in both the most recent releases
of Ubuntu and Fedora, a lot of reviews and comments centred around
improved consistency in themes (especially consistency when switching
between light/dark themes). With a lucid build, I expect you will need
to setup X resources to match your theme. With the GTK build, it looks
like it inherits from whatever you set your default theme to (for menus
etc).

Personally, I tend to define my theme and just leave it. I do use a dark
theme and after many years, I have a good default Xresources, so not a
big issue for me (with the exception of some qt based apps). However,
for a generation brought up using Gnome, the whole xrdb stuff is likely
to be challenging/frustrating. I assume similar issues will exist for
the no toolket default. I don't think this is sufficient reason not to
change the default to (lets say) lucid - just mention it as I suspect it
will cause some disruption/frustration. There also seems to be a lot of
bad information about using/setting Xresources out there, which might
add to the confusion.