Re: PGTK-related misconceptions

[Po Lu]

"Dirk-Jan C. Binnema" <djcb.bulk@gmail.com> writes:

> Appreciate the efforts on this, but the outcome seems somewhat
> unsatisfactory, if I understand correctly:
>
> - we have the "non-pure" gtk build which supports X (although gtk has a
>   wayland backend, non-pure gtk assumes X)

"Non-pure GTK" uses GTK for widgets, but directly uses X Windows APIs
for input and display, and some other features too.

> - we have "pure" gtk, which supports X and Wayland, but now it turns
>   out there's a bunch of limitations on X.

Yes.

> From the the time before pgtk got merged, I can't remember any wide
> discussion of it being wayland-only. Perhaps I misremember.

I looked over those discussions not too long ago, and it seems that
nobody really used the PGTK build on X Windows.  Those who did
immediately ran into resizing glitches, keyboard input issues, and some
features just not being implemented, such as responding to configure
events.

> I regularly use both X and Wayland, and having to have two emacsen (and
> remember to use the right one) just for that seems sub-optimal. Wouldn't
> it be better to have a single gtk3 backend? For users and developers and
> distributors?

That isn't possible, at least not without a lot of work.

> But maybe the problems is small, i.e. perhaps pgtk works fine on X, but
> doesn't currently implement a handful of things, which we can document?
> Then users can decide if they can live with that.

That list would be very long, would include serious types of
misbehavior, be liable to change at the whim of the GTK developers, so
the truth is that users should simply stay away from PGTK on X.