Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Tim Cross]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> 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.

You missed my point. I'm not saying the change is because of a stylistic
issue - I'm saying the change is likely to create a stylistic
issue. This will in turn cause more resistance to the change and
possibly increase motivation to do whatever is necessary to re-enable
gtk build. 

>
>> 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.
>

Yes, I know that and that is a problem for distributions where they want
to minimise the distro size and number of packages which need to be
maintained. As it stands now, most distributions include 3 packages -
emacs-gtk, emacs-lucid and emacs-nox. As they move to support wayland,
they will either have to include emacs-pgtk or continue with the
wayland-x interface. The risk is, given they need GTK for both emacs-gtk
and emacs-pgtk, they will drop the emacs-lucid package rather than the
emacs-gtk package (unless we help educate them on why that would be a
bad choice). To educate effectively, it helps to understand their
situation and not just address the technical issues seen from a pure
emacs development position.

>> 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.

OK, so how does my Emacs default theme change between dark and light
theme when I change the theme of my desktop environment? This never use
to work and I assumed it was because emacs didn't respect the DE
theme. I use to manage it via X resources. However, I noticed on recent
installs under both Ubuntu and Fedora that changing between light and
dark themes also resulted in changes to (for example) the menus and
menu-bar from a light background with dark text to a dark background
with light text. My assumption was that this was due to the GTK theme
being respected?
>
>> 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.
>

Which is fine for those who know lisp. However, this isn't what people
expect these days. THis was my point - lots of the comments and reviews
for recent distributions of Ubuntu and Fedora have referenced greatly
improved theme/style consistencies. From my own limited experience, this
appears to extend to Emacs as well (to a limited extent, not the whole
UI, just menus, popup dialogue boxes etc.

>> 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.

Ignoring the level of motivation visual appeal/style has to peoples
decisions is likely to be somewhat naive. There are plenty of examples
of superior technology/solutions losing to inferior ones because of
non-technical reasons.

I also wonder about how frequent these crashes and technical issues
are. I switched over from gtk to lucid a little while ago. However,
prior to switching, I experienced absolutely no issues and I cannot
recall the last time Emacs crashed for me. I'm running latest emacs
devel (29.0.50) on Fedora 36 (previously on Ubutnu 22.04). I'm a heavy
Emacs users, running it every day all day and using it for nearly
everything. I switched to lucid because the technical arguments made
sense to me. However, I did not experience any of the technical issues
you reference. If my experience is more common, then your purely
technical argument is going to have difficulty gaining traction.