Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu]

"Dirk-Jan C. Binnema" <djcb@djcbsoftware.nl> writes:

> So it does not apply to pgtk on Wayland? What about on X?

PGTK is not supported on X and does not run correctly there.

> I don't use X, but I can't remember problems copy-pasting between other
> Gtk program (say, GEdit and gnome-builder). What is emacs doing
> differently?

Emacs has higher requirements, since we perform selection encoding
ourselves with decades-old battle tested code in select.el.

> I've seen some old grumblings and apparently some new problem with
> Xinput2-related code. But I've been happily using gtk-based emacs since
> 20 years or so? So, I find it strange if it suddenly changed to
> "abysmal" and selected for immediate demotion to be non-default.

The changes happened gradually after GTK 3.4.  I guess people don't
notice gradual changes.

> I'm not seeing any of that. What about Gimp & Inkscape -- don't they
> support Xinput2?

The GIMP still uses GTK+ 2.x due to difficulties porting to GTK 3.
It does not use XInput 2.

Inkscape uses GTK 3 and suffers from the same crashes that Emacs does if
the trackpad is disabled upon typing.  Its usage patterns differ from
Emacs's, so the bug occurs there less.  After all, people do not type
much in a vector graphics editor.

> There are always excuses for bugs of course :-) In this case it seems
> that emacs exercises some old code in new ways, while the maintainers
> are concentrating on Wayland. 

The point is, we support X11, and if GTK cannot properly support X11,
the GTK build should not be the default.  The priorities of the GTK
maintainers are not an excuse.