Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> Like others in this thread, I don't use the menu-bar, toolbar,
> scroll-bars etc, so toolkit seems somewhat irrelevant (I have to do an
> M-x version to see which one I'm using!). I build using lucid as that
> seemed like a better choice than gtk and I use xfce rather than gnome as
> my desktop environment (and sometimes stumpwm).

[...]

> I suspect a part of the decision regarding which toolkit to build emacs
> with for various distros probably relates to minimising the number of
> toolkits to install. As Gnome seems to be the current 'default', gtk is
> already installed, so will likely be a preferred choice unless some
> other compelling reason is given.

The problem here is not a stylistic issue.  I want to disable the GTK
build by default because it leads to serious problems for users, up to
and including crashes.

> With Fedora now shipping with Wayland as default and the recent
> announcement regarding nvidia driver licensing and support for nvidia
> under wayland, I suspectg we will see a significant growth in
> distributions defaulting to wayland and wanting to reduce/remove
> dependency on X. 

The regular GTK build of Emacs will not run on GNOME Wayland either.
People who want to use Wayland should use the different PGTK build instead.

> One factor which will likely come into play if we changed the default
> toolkit is theming. I've noticed that in both the most recent releases
> of Ubuntu and Fedora, a lot of reviews and comments centred around
> improved consistency in themes (especially consistency when switching
> between light/dark themes). With a lucid build, I expect you will need
> to setup X resources to match your theme. With the GTK build, it looks
> like it inherits from whatever you set your default theme to (for menus
> etc).

Emacs's own interface doesn't respect any toolkit theme.

> Personally, I tend to define my theme and just leave it. I do use a dark
> theme and after many years, I have a good default Xresources, so not a
> big issue for me (with the exception of some qt based apps). However,
> for a generation brought up using Gnome, the whole xrdb stuff is likely
> to be challenging/frustrating. I assume similar issues will exist for
> the no toolket default.

The no toolkit build can be customized entirely with Lisp.

> I don't think this is sufficient reason not to change the default to
> (lets say) lucid - just mention it as I suspect it will cause some
> disruption/frustration. There also seems to be a lot of bad
> information about using/setting Xresources out there, which might add
> to the confusion.

Are you sure what you understand "this" is?  I'm going to say this
again: defaulting to the GTK build because it "looks better" or is "more
consistent" is quite simply trading crashes for looks.