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Comment by thw_9a83c

1 day ago

I wouldn't say that maintainers break API, "for no reason at all", but surely they don't make the stable API a priority either. The fact is, that every API breaking change is an insult to developers/users of that API. But this is an unfortunate state of the Linux desktop.

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thw_9a83c

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the_biot  1 day ago

Yes, no reason at all. I submit as evidence gtk_hbox_new(), there since the very first version of GTK, and deprecated in 3.2, in favor of gtk_box_new(GTK_ORIENTATION_HORIZONTAL).

It's a prime example of something that was entirely unnecessary, could have been hidden from the user with a macro, or (pointlessly) added but keeping the old API in place.

They do this all the time. It's not just the idiocy, it's the blatant hostility towards their users that gets me.

  • rleigh  1 day ago

    Yes, this is a prime example of completely gratuitous breakage.

    The change adds zero value. It's a deliberate API break. And it could have been made a non-breaking change all for the sake of a single one-line macro or inline function.

    This isn't unintentional. It's a deliberate choice they have made. And not just this one, it's happened repeatedly over the years.

    The thing that really gets me, as an end-user/developer, is that it forces incompatible changes not only in my codebases, but in every other application developer's codebases worldwide. A small change in GTK+ imposes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of maintenance work upon every application developer. And this burdensome work not only takes time, effort and money, it doesn't improve our applications one iota, and on top of that, it breaks backward compatibility so our code will not longer build with older GTK+ versions. Most of us won't be chasing the latest development release, applications might need to target a wide range of distributions with a wide range of GTK+ versions. So it's a logistical nightmare as well.

    The lack of concern for the needs of actual application developers is why I eventually had to give up on it entirely. At some point it doesn't make any sense either commercially or for free software development, it's just masochism.

    • joz1-k  1 day ago

      I completely agree. This comment should be carved in stone for future generations to see. API breaking changes should never be made just to chase illusory butterflies.

  • thw_9a83c  1 day ago

    This is sad. Actually, a long time ago I stopped working on two Linux desktop applications that used KDE framework libraries. I managed to port them from KDE1 to KDE2, but I got frustrated and lost my patience with KDE3 changes which had nothing to do with my application and I just gave up. Sorry to hear that GTK is the same constantly changing target. After this experience I actually like Web-UIs and CLI apps a lot more.