Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival

Sorry for the late reply. I'm not getting any email notifications [...]

Don't worry, it happens, no biggie. Happened to me too in the past especially with forums of different formats than I knew, or with different defaults.

We still didn't tidy up or test all the engines and themes, but we started collecting them here:

Yeah, I noticed the new themes and engines repos incidentally a few days ago. Cloned them then but didn't have time to look through the code or try to compile them. Will do at some point.

greenjeans wrote some scripts and isos that make it way easier to test it

Will look at that too, soon. Just woke up and there's e-mail to take care first, forum posts to read (and reply if needed).

About the warnings: I fixed MANY more and no there are no introspection errors anymore.

That's great! I'll compare to my own previous fixes, see what it's been done and what I could've done [better]. By the way, your editor/IDE doesn't seem to automatically strip whitespace, or maybe you didn't get to go through all files. It's annoying sometimes - OK, everytime - to make a small change to a file and upon comparison with the original to get dozens or hundreds of mismatches just because the original had a truckload of whitespace. I wonder, were all those empty lines containing only spaces or tabs counted in as lines of code, back then...?

I wonder if the original gtk2 developers broke bindings for other languages and just never fixed it.

Could be, anything's possible. Maybe it's my paranoia but I always thought programmers intentionally leave their previous project in a bad state, maybe adding some bad commits right before throwing it aside, in order to justify the existence of the new and shiny version of it. Although in all fairness it's also possible that the old concept was so bad and/or the code was so screwed up that it simply wasn't worth the effort of fixing it for whatever retro fans might've had at some point in the future. Speaking generally, not particularly about Gtk2.

When I watched that video, I was really mad

Me too, and I don't even have a dog in this fight. Dunno who that guy is, never watched him before, but it stroke me right off the bat as a douchebag that speaks a lot without saying anything [of value]. He can't even read or spell correctly FFS! Don't mind little dogs barking, go about your business!

[...]

I've been where you are, in a way, many years ago. Always looking forward to the future. That's because back then the future genuinely seemed to bring good things. Useful things. Fixes and improvements. New features I wanted/needed. And for a while - maybe too short a while - it was true. I was happy. And then at some point things started going backwards. Those good things started to be hidden behind [invisible] guards, or were even removed completely. At best they were crippled enough to make them undesirable or unusable.

At that point I said to myself: «fuck the future, it's gonna destroy everything that's been good so far; gotta stick with whatever still works as I want/need». And I managed to do that for some time. Put in some effort, sometimes a great deal of effort just to stay afloat in a sea of "modernism" that was trying to take away all the good things the past had given to me/us. But slowly I had to give in. First to one thing, then to another, and another, and another until I got to the point that I had to completely shift the paradigm. It was sad and dire. But I survived. Reborn from the ashes I adapted to something new and different. I worked hard to get things back to the level I wanted/needed. It was fine for a while - too short a while. Then change came again upon me.

You know how it felt to me? As if the builders who built my house came to my door and said: «get out, we gotta tear down your house and build a newer, better one». And I was: «why? I'm just so happy here, finally adjusted [to] it, and it became all I was dreaming of. why would you destroy the house I've been working so hard to fix and decorate to my liking?!» And they said: «oh, that's just how things work. your house is obsolete. move on.»

I understand why this is happening. Not gonna say it out loud but I guess/hope people would suspect the real reason. Do I have to agree and comply? Hell no. But that's gonna cost me. Dearly at some point. Or maybe I won't live enough to get there.

Dunno how old you are, and would hate to make assumptions. Maybe you're still in that phase where the future seems bright and brings a lot of good things so you'd gladly let go of the past. But I believe there will come a day when you realize this future was deceiving, and it took away much more than it gave. And you'll want to stick with the little good things you still have. You'll wanna live, or at least to survive, to be left in peace in your old dear house. Just like I (and many others like me) want[ed] to. But you won't be able to - not for too long. Because... oh, that's just how things work. And you'll remember: what goes around comes around.

I hope we all come to peace with all these changes and requirements and whatnot. The last thing we need is to get more fragmented than we already are. As a community, as a society.