Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu]

Rudolf Adamkovič <salutis@me.com> writes:

> +1 We should look at the big picture and keep the discussion going until
> we know where to go long-term.  Further, why not look at the other free
> projects that have solved the problem already?
>
> For example, I keep hearing about how Blender does a fantastic job with
> their UI, which is multi-platform and yet highly praised.  The UI caters
> perfectly to the program and to the people who use it.  That aligns with
> the "Emacs way" more than fighting GUI frameworks that keep changing
> with UX fashion like Gnome and GTK do, in my opinion.

[...]

> Could we learn anything from Blender?  Obviously, Emacs has different
> requirements, such as a more advanced "text view" component, but what
> about the rest?

I note that Blender has much more development momentum than Emacs, and
was one of the programs I tested while working on the drag-and-drop
support.

It has several big problems there, including only supporting version 3
of the XDND protocol (which is obsolete and most noticeably does not
work with other programs written with GTK+, both 2.x and 3.x), not
deleting XdndTypeList after the drag-and-drop operation completes, and
not deleting the property given in a SelectionNotify event after reading
it.

It also doesn't support frame resize synchronization, so resizing a
Blender window will make its contents lag behind the resize.  Compare
that to Emacs 29, under a compositing manager such as GNOME Shell.

Blender's menus are also a sore spot.  They do not grab the mouse or
workably extend outside the toplevel window boundaries, which makes
displaying long menus (think Help -> Describe -> Describe Language
Environment) very annoying.

The other fundamental difference between us and Blender is that Blender
is 3D animation software, and thus can afford all of these problems,
since graphics professionals will be running it fullscreen, not
alongside other programs on a desktop.  We can not, especially not when
every other text editor that does use a toolkit does all of that
correctly.

So, if a project as large as Blender cannot get it right, how is it
practical for us to do so?