[ruby-talk:7577] Re: GTK+ on Windows

In article <[e-mail]>,
Conrad Schneiker <[e-mail]> wrote:
>Richard Schulman writes,
>
># I haven't used GTK+ myself, but I am concerned by comments
># that its port to the Windows environment is "mediocre." See,
># for example, the otherwise enthusiastic Sun World article at
># 
># http://www.sunworld.com/sunworldonline/swol-11-2000/swol-1110-gtk.html
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>The only negative thing I've previously seen is a gripe about the GTK+ 
>file selector. This IIRC was in a Mozilla newsgroup, where IIRC someone 
>was getting flack for planning to implent their own version of a file 
>selector rather than making and contributing the change directly to GTK+ 
>itself. 
>
>Here is what the above-cited article says with reference to "mediocre":
>
># But perhaps the most frequent complaint about GTK+ is its mediocre
># support of Win32. While GTK+ 2.0 includes a framework that addresses
># this problem, GTK+'s Windows support hasn't ripened like Qt's and
># Tk's.
>
>Well, I don't really have any good idea what that means. However it seems 
>to also indicate that such problems, whatever they are, will soon go away. 
>I don't have any idea what fraction of (actual, potential) GTK+ users make 
>such complaints, nor what they mean by "mediocre support" (e.g. printing 
>support, pure windows look and feel, or what?) And I don't have any idea 
>if these opinions are to any extent offset by countervailing satisfied 
>users who would disagree.
>
>So maybe the best thing to do is to cc: the authors, Cameron Laird and 
>Kathryn Soraiz, and see if one of them might be willing and able to 
>elaborate a bit for us. (If so, the bigger context of this discussion is, 
>what should be the successor to Tk as the next major (Linux/Unix/Win/Mac) 
>Ruby-standard GUI, in case you would like to comment on that issue as 
>well. Thanks in advance.)
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Thanks, Conrad, for your invitation--and thank you
even more for all the productive work you daily
post to c.l.r.  I apologize for the obscurity of
that paragraph, and appreciate the opportunity to
elaborate on it here.

As Jens Luedicke says elswhere in this thread,
  A windows-user might not like GTK+'s
  standard dialogs (File Open, Save, ...).
  They might look a little "poor". compared
  to them used by Windows, Qt or KDE.

Owen Taylor wrote me this fall that
  The Win32 release is being worked on as
  part of the GTK+-2.0 release; it's lagging
  the X port a bit, since most of the main
  development is still being done on Unix
  and the Win32 poeple have to play catch
  up. But despite that it seems to be coming
  along well. 

I don't keep up sufficiently well with GTK+ for
Windows to add much intelligence to that.  I know
that, even more than with Qt, Tk, ..., the talent
working on GTK+ focuses first on Linux.  GTK+'s
Win* libraries never have felt as "ripe" as those
for various Unixes, and I have a sliver more worry
about GTK+ than other toolkits that its Win* port
might stagnate.  2.0 is certainly looking good,
though.

I've sent Owen a copy of this follow-up; perhaps
he or another GTK+ insider will choose to say more
here in comp.lang.ruby.
-- 

Cameron Laird <[e-mail]>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html