Comment by rleigh

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.