Re: Cleaning out old X11 toolkits?

[martin rudalics]

> In more pragmatic terms, I would guess that it's entirely possible to
> excise motif/lesstif, athena, and Xaw3d from main without anyone noticing.

I regularly build with Motif.  Here it's just as reliable as Lucid.

> Whether this is worth the effort in a world leaning ever so slowly towards
> Cairo and pgtk is a little hard to tell, but a quick grep through src
> suggests that it would at least clear up a bunch of #ifdef spaghetti.
>
> Would the maintainers be interested in a branch that tried this? Would it
> be better to wait for pgtk to settle first? Is there a big use-case for
> those toolkits of which I'm unaware?

The only build I'd clean out is GTK-3.  Seriously.  I really ask people
to use the pgtk branch for their daily work on a regular basis.  Once it
has been merged in, we can banish GTK-3 (not necessarily GTK-2 which
works quite satisfactorily here) from the remaining X-parts of our code
base and nobody will complain about those #ifdef spaghetti any more.

I give you one simple example with emacs -Q and the following one-line
initial file:

(setq default-frame-alist '((cursor-color . "red3") (height . 32)))

Here this works well with Lucid, Motif, GTK-2 and without x-toolkit.  It
does not work with GTK-3, which shows four lines below the minibuffer
that apparently do not belong to anyone (it works with a GTK-3 build of
Emacs 25 though).  And the X pgtk build here simply refuses to shrink
the frame to 32 lines but keeps it at 36 lines.  It's behaviors like
this that can keep you busy trying to make GTK-3 builds do something
reasonable at least.

Once all the GTK-3 specific stuff has been moved to pgtk, people can fix
GTK-3 specific bugs there and do not have to care about Motif or other
X11-toolkits any more just as they do not have to care about W32 or NS
now.

martin