Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> I feel like I'm repeating myself here a lot now.  So to recap:
>
> 1) The crash under a Gtk build should be fixed -- in any case, no matter
> what else we do.  If that means disabling XInput 2 under Gtk, that's fine.

It's not fine.  Because once that happens, people will stop using the
XInput 2 build (since it will no longer be the default), and it will
simply rot like xwidgets, XEmbed, child frames, colormapped display
support.  Then, at some point, the GTK developers will delete the core
input support like they have been threatening to for a while and leave
us with no option but the now-non-working XI2 build.

Which is why XInput 2 should stay on.  GTK -- off.

> 2) I think we should default to not using a toolkit.  But the issues in
> 1-5) I delineated must be fixed first.  (This isn't a discussion -- I'm
> stating a requisite.)

Those problems are never going to be solved with our manpower, so we
might as well stop dreaming and pick something that already exists (and
for obvious reasons GTK is not an option -- that one crash is simply one
out of many.)

As I said, the only place a "no-toolkit" build exists is under X, and
even there several very old pieces of code are being used to piece
together a toolkit.  And as you've probably noticed, even that code
doesn't work very well, since most of the complicated modern toolkit
behavior is not present.  Everything from mouse-over popups in menus to
font sets and internationalized text display.

Not even Microsoft can afford to maintain their own toolkit for VS Code.
They use a web browser, which is a terrible idea that should never be
let near Emacs.

> (And did you get my off-list email, or did it go to a spam bucket
> again?)

The latter.  Here, I'm getting mail delivered two or three times from
lists.gnu.org.