Re: Merging the pgtk branch

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2021 17:12:46 +0200
>> From: "Bozhidar Batsov" <bozhidar@batsov.dev>
>> 
>> Fair enough, let me try to clarify my question. I had just assumed that all 
>> Unix systems (except macOS)
>> default to the old GTK front-end (when it comes to Emacs with GUI, that is) 
>> and I was wondering if the
>> expectation was that pgtk would mostly replace it right away (e.g. because 
>> of it's improved compatibility with
>> Wayland) once Emacs 28 is released. 
>
> AFAIU, you _have_ to specify --with-x-toolkit=VALUE at configure time;
> there's no default.  If you don't specify it, you get an X build with
> no toolkit.

> As for PGTK: we didn't yet decide whether to promote it as the
> recommended toolkit.  AFAIU, there are some issues with it (whose root
> cause is how Wayland works), and we are not yet sure whether users
> will live in peace with those issues.  We need more feedback and more
> user experience for that.

There are some other problems with it (by design): it's scantily tested,
and it doesn't respect Z groups in child frames, it doesn't work with
the X resource database (not everyone wants to use GSettings), and it
also lacks several other features.

This situation will take quite a while to improve.  Some of the problem
needs improvements in GTK+3, which will probably not happen due to the
attitude of the GTK developers.  Please don't make it the recommended
toolkit.

Thanks.