The ebuilds for SWT 3.0 and 3.1 both include GTK as a hard dependency. However, SWT runs much faster with Motif instead of the incredibly slow GTK, so ideally I'd like this ebuild to honor the "-gtk" in my USE flags. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Are there specific instances where you find the GTK+ version of SWT slow?
Not really, just all the time.
What sort of hardware are you running on, and what version of GTK+ are you using? Also, I'd be curious to know what X server version and X driver you're using.
Athlon XP 2500+ 512MB RAM GTK+ 2.6.2 Xorg X11 6.8.2-r1 NVIDIA driver 66.29 That being said, I've witnessed this same problem with the relative speeds of Motif and GTK, on pretty much every Linux machine I've ever used.
I can think of reasons why an SWT/Motif application would feel faster than an SWT/GTK+ application: GTK+ has full i18n, antialiased fonts, complex themes, and much more featureful widgets. However, on a machine as fast as yours I would not expect these to be so obtuse as to cause you to actually want to run the Motif version, or call it "the incredibly slow GTK". Are you just basing this on experience with Eclipse, or also with other SWT applications? Have you compared the Motif and GTK+ versions with a recent 3.1 release such as 3.1M5a (there are some significant improvements in 3.1). Also, I am curious, what theme do you use for GTK+? Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, by the way.
Motif support seems to be heading towards depreciation, and in light of such, there will not be support for it. If there is a reason why it should be added to the tree, feel free to reopen the bug.
So is the Motif option being replaced with something better?
We will not be adding support for it in the tree. Although you can always write an ebuild and maintain it yourself in your overlay.
OK. So I assume SWT is going to be made a virtual so that I can do this somewhat easily.
Actually what baffles me the most is... I'm allowed to install net-p2p/azureus-bin without GTK, because that ebuild actually honours my USE flags... and doing so makes it run a lot faster. But I can't install net-p2p/azureus without GTK, since that one doesn't. The way I see it, the two should at least be consistent. Unless consistency is against the Gentoo philosophy.
