Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

["Dirk-Jan C. Binnema" <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl>]

On Monday Aug 22 2022, Po Lu wrote:

> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> 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 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.
>
> The problem here is not a stylistic issue.  I want to disable the GTK
> build by default because it leads to serious problems for users, up to
> and including crashes.

Does this apply to pgtk as well?

TBH, this whole thread sounds needlessly alarmist.

The various GTK builds have been working fine for me and apparently the
majority of emacs users on GNU/Linux. "Abysmal" does not describe that
all all.

There have been grumblings about scenarios that GTK doesn't implement
correctly or at all, and there were some big warning for that (there
still may be). It seems we now emacs is adding a new such scenario
(XInput2), while the GTK developers have lost some interest in X11 -- it
seems we should just not enable XInput2 in that case.

I'd actually hope we'd be able to do it _more_ with GTK, such as having
GTK tabs, using the header bar, etc., where emacs currently looks rather
antiquated.

Kind regards,
Dirk.


-- 
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema                  Helsinki, Finland
e:djcb@djcbsoftware.nl           w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
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