I use an XFCE desktop and only non-Gnome apps. None of the apps I have installed depend on gtk4 or will be ported to gtk4 in the forseeable future (and if they do, I will most likely switch to Qt/KDE). But my main graphics app is geeqie (a non-Gnome, gtk3-only app), which unconditionally depend on zenity. As there are only gtk4 versions of zenity in portage, zenity pulls in gtk4 and gstreamer. I checked twice: Nothing but zenity depends on gtk4 and gstreamer on my system. I removed the zenity dependency in the geeqie ebuild for testing, and immediately zenity and 7 more packages got depcleaned, among them gtk4, libadwaita and gst-plugins-bad. Moreover, my system has only gtk3 themes installed, no gtk4 themes. Hence, gtk4 zenity dialogs look very bad: Wrong font and fontsize, completely wrong colors, wrong icons, somewhat alien title bar and buttons, ... So please provide a gtk3 version of zenity as long as gtk3 is supported. Installing many megabytes of gtk4 stuff just to display messages in a single gtk3 app in a gtk3-only system is excessive and unacceptable. gtk3 zenity is still actively maintained upstream.
Best-effort security and outright crash fixes getting backported, maybe, maybe not, isn't "actively maintained". There is no gstreamer requirement if you disable it on gui-libs/gtk USE flag and cripple gtk4 to not work for its video support. If xfce or some other project wants to cater for this use case, we can talk about shared maintenance where they maintain an old series and we maintain zenity4. gnome@ has no interest in supporting old versions as already discussed on bug 932185 already. They are also not parallel-installable and I'm not sure all zenity consumers are actually happy with zenity3 at this point in their options usage. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 932185 ***
Reassigning to XFCE for their consideration
Before more bugs like this one and re LibreOffice pop up: The world is not standing still around your personal preferences of toolkit usage. Much like I can't be bothered to keep around Qt5-based versions of applications - in fact we are actively rooting them out wherever possible - I don't think gnome proj is going to take on the burden of supporting legacy versions here and in other places. The only relevant question to us downstreams is: Is there any way that a GTK4 based application can look fine within a Mate/Cinnamon/Xfce4 environment or not - with *default* themes/decorations. Anything else is just a verbatim copy of the discussion back when GTK3 was supposed to replace GTK2, where the sentiment was much the same around these DEs, but in the end everyone ported to GTK+3 anyway ...
Well, I think there are several big difference compared to qt5->qt6 and compared to gtk2->gtk3: 1.) For gtk2->gtk3 and qt5->qt6, everyone had already installed *both* versions, because *both* were needed for any reasonable set of applications. But I think many Xfce, Mate or LXDE users have *no* gtk4 installed (or at least, have no applications installed which require gtk4). So things like zenity or the LO gtk4 backend cause a whole lot of packages to be installed which would not be installed otherwise (which might be a problem on small systems, and Xfce or LXDE are for small systems). 2.) Most important, for qt5->qt6 the desktop environment was at qt6 for some time before qt5 was removed, and for gtk2->gtk3 most gtk desktop environments were already at gtk3. So at the time qt5 and gtk2 were removed, the primary GUI lib already was qt6 or gtk3, and gtk5 and gtk2 was only used by aging / unmaintained apps. This is not the case here: As far as I know, mate has decided not to move to gtk4 at all, and Xfce and Lxde also have not even started to move to gtk4. So the primary gui lib for such desktops will still remain gtk3 for years. And the same is true for some of my primary apps: As far as I know, geany is not working on a gtk4 version, geeqie is not, atril is definitely not, I'm not aware of gtk4 versions of firefox or thunderbird or rawtherapee, wxWidgets is not going to ever be gtk4 and is essential for me, and so on: For all those things, there is no reasonable gtk4 equivalent. 3.) Gentoo stopped maintaining gtk2 and qt5 when it was obvious that they will no longer be needed at all within months (which is in fact not the case for gtk2: gtk2 is still kept alive because there are some apps which need them, like gimp. I've still installed a dozen packages for which still no reasonable gtk3 or qt6 substitute exists). But for gtk3, it is obvious that there will be at least three desktop environments and several dozen applications which will depend on gtk3 for the next few years. So I think it is by far too early to partially remove support for gtk3 or even for gtk3-only systems. 4.) I'm not sure what the current situation is, because I have not been looking at themes for many years, but if I remember correctly, the gtk standard themes are not suitable for Xfce: All themes adapted to Xfce bring a xfwm4 and a xfce-notify-4.0 subdirectory in addition to gtk-2.0 and gtk-3.0 with them. These directories are missing in the gtk standard themes. Xfce tries to install its additions to the standard gtk themes, but this didn't always go well. When I tried last, the gtk standard themes had visability / usability problems with xfwm title bars. So using them with xfce was less than optimal. And as far as mate goes, gentoo should at least support the standard mate themes (i.e. those which are part of mate), and most or all of them are not gtk4.
I had an interesting discussion with my students (see also bug 950270), and it raised another reason why gtk3->gtk4 is very different from gtk2->gtk3 and qt5->qt6: gtk2->gtk3 and qt5->qt6 tried to preserve the look and feel as much as possible: There were some optical differences, and some widgets were slightly modified, but except for that, the average user noticed no difference, and at the first glance could not even tell if an application was based on gtk2 or gtk3 (or on qt5 or qt6): Among others, dialog layout was identical, and titlebar functionality was also identical. But when switching from gtk3 to gtk4 (in non-Gnome environments), user interface compatibility is often broken, because when changing from gtk3 to gtk4, many applications try to switch to some Gnome-specific features which contradict the user interface expectations of non-Gnome users and violate the UI design guidelines of non-Gnome desktops. Example zenity: Most dialogs no longer have a title bar! (for users who are not used to Gnome: How do you move that damned thing with your mouse???). Moreover, some button positions in the dialogs were changed. Example libreoffice: All dialogs were converted to use client side title bars, and all dialog buttons were moved from the bottom right corner to the left and right corners of the title bar! gtk2->gtk3 and qt5->qt6 tried very hard to be as non-disrupting as possible for the user, but gtk3->gtk4 is a disruptive change for the user, at least for non-Gnome users, and the apps converted to gtk4 seem to be more Gnome-specific in design and behaviour than ever and more alien to non-Gnome environments and non-Gnome user interface guidelines than ever... Libreoffice with gtk4 is no longer universal gtk4 libreoffice, w.r.t. user interface it has become Gnome-specific libreoffice, so we need another universal gtk libreoffice...
(In reply to Andreas Sturmlechner from comment #3) > Before more bugs like this one and re LibreOffice pop up: The world is not > standing still around your personal preferences of toolkit usage. Much like > I can't be bothered to keep around Qt5-based versions of applications - in > fact we are actively rooting them out wherever possible - I don't think > gnome proj is going to take on the burden of supporting legacy versions here > and in other places. Well, I'm quite surprised that gtk is maintained by the Gnome team in Gentoo. gtk ist *not* the "Gnome toolkit". gtk and the gtk team is strongly expected to serve *all* gtk-based desktop environemnts, *all* gtk-based applications, and *all* gtk-based toolkits (like wxWidgets) equally well and in the same quality. The gnome-biased attitude of gtk people is unacceptable. > The only relevant question to us downstreams is: Is there any way that a > GTK4 based application can look fine within a Mate/Cinnamon/Xfce4 > environment or not - with *default* themes/decorations. 1.) It's not just the look, it's usability, UI consistency, and obeying style guidelines: As long as Xfce, Mate, etc. have not switched to gtk4 and Gnome style, their apps have to uniformly follow non-Gnome gtk3 style. As I wrote, I have 95 % users with windows-only background on my Gentoo server for students, they are confused by Gnome-style things. The gnome team would also be not happy at all if the usability and desktop uniformity of their desktop or their central applications would be changed in favour of some other desktop environment style, violating the gnome style guidelines! Your statement is *very* unfair! 2.) In case of LO we are talking about serious bugs, not just beauty: - Several crashes in gtk4 which are not present in gtk3 or qt or X11 backend. - The need to manually set an environment variable which was not needed before LO 25. 3.) I strongly disagree about supporting the *default* only: In the same way a C compiler is expected to handle *any* syntactically valid C language source without crashes, a toolkit or application is expected to handle *any* syntactially valid theme css without crashes or serious bugs. And if the theme definition is not valid, the toolkit is expected to give error messages and handle the situation gracefully (which it does not). I don't require all themes to look nice, but I expect things to work for all valid themes in the same way I expect a compiler to process all valid programs. And as far as I know, non-CSD style is an officially supported feature of Xfce, even for standard gtk3 without the non-CSD patch. If I remember correctly, it even *is* the default setting in Xfce and CSD is the non-default. Especially Gentoo is about choice, flexibility and configurability. > Anything else is just a verbatim copy of the discussion back when GTK3 was > supposed to replace GTK2, where the sentiment was much the same around these > DEs, but in the end everyone ported to GTK+3 anyway ... The situation is different, see my arguments above. Knowing the goals and the manpower of xfce, wxWidgets, Mate and some other projects, "in the end" is at least three years from now, most likely more, you are just ahead of time with the forced switch. And I think gtk is needlessly wasting a lot of manpower in a lot of projects by forcing gtk4 porting, manpower which could be spent better for other improvements. I think in total significantly less manpower would be required worldwide to maintain gtk3 and gtk4 in parallel instead of porting all gtk3 software to gtk4. After all, the requirements and the styles of Gnome and non-Gnome software are diverging more and more, sooner or later two different toolkits will be required anyway for serving the Gnome and non-Gnome world. I believe at least 95 % of all Xfce, Mate, ... users are perfectly happy with gtk3 and it's look & feel. After all, this different look and feel is the reason why they are *not* using Gnome!
(In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #6) > (In reply to Andreas Sturmlechner from comment #3) > > Before more bugs like this one and re LibreOffice pop up: The world is not > > standing still around your personal preferences of toolkit usage. Much like > > I can't be bothered to keep around Qt5-based versions of applications - in > > fact we are actively rooting them out wherever possible - I don't think > > gnome proj is going to take on the burden of supporting legacy versions here > > and in other places. > > Well, I'm quite surprised that gtk is maintained by the Gnome team in Gentoo. > gtk ist *not* the "Gnome toolkit". > Are you really *surprised* by that? It's a gnome.org project and it's consumed heavily by GNOME where they often need new features first. > gtk and the gtk team is strongly expected to serve *all* gtk-based desktop > environemnts, *all* gtk-based applications, and *all* gtk-based toolkits > (like wxWidgets) equally well and in the same quality. > > The gnome-biased attitude of gtk people is unacceptable. Can we please keep this bug for actual changes that need to be made in packages? This isn't the right place to debate upstream behaviour. asturm is saying that we cannot live forever in the past, and gtk3 will stop being maintained at some point. Hence if there's problems, you need to be filing bugs with mate/cinnamon/xfce4/whatever for them to adapt themes and so on. (and asturm isn't part of the gnome team either.)
(In reply to Sam James from comment #7) > (In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #6) > > (In reply to Andreas Sturmlechner from comment #3) > > > Before more bugs like this one and re LibreOffice pop up: The world is not > > > standing still around your personal preferences of toolkit usage. Much like > > > I can't be bothered to keep around Qt5-based versions of applications - in > > > fact we are actively rooting them out wherever possible - I don't think > > > gnome proj is going to take on the burden of supporting legacy versions here > > > and in other places. > > > > Well, I'm quite surprised that gtk is maintained by the Gnome team in Gentoo. > > gtk ist *not* the "Gnome toolkit". > > > > Are you really *surprised* by that? It's a gnome.org project and it's > consumed heavily by GNOME where they often need new features first. Yes, I am surprised. I know that gtk is developed within the scope of Gnome upstream. But within Gentoo, which is proud of being multi-platform and supporting many desktop environments, I expected gtk to be a collaborative effort of *all* gtk consumers, respecting and supporting all their individual needs. > > gtk and the gtk team is strongly expected to serve *all* gtk-based desktop > > environemnts, *all* gtk-based applications, and *all* gtk-based toolkits > > (like wxWidgets) equally well and in the same quality. > > > > The gnome-biased attitude of gtk people is unacceptable. > > Can we please keep this bug for actual changes that need to be made in > packages? This isn't the right place to debate upstream behaviour. > > asturm is saying that we cannot live forever in the past, and gtk3 will stop > being maintained at some point. Hence if there's problems, you need to be > filing bugs with mate/cinnamon/xfce4/whatever for them to adapt themes and > so on. But outside gnome, what you call "past" will be state of the art for the next few years, and will be what people still want and expect. asturm is just way too early with his actions. There are no changes needed to any packages. The only thing needed is stop dropping old packages and features until gtk3 is really "past" for *everyone*. I don't expect Gentoo to fix my local styles and settings. But my local styles and settings worked and looked perfectly fine up to now, and I expect Gentoo not to break them any time soon (more exactly, not to break them before Xfce has officially switched to gtk4). My working zenity (which is used by geeqie, a pure gtk3 app) was broken by dropping the gtk3 version of zenity, and LO was broken just a few days ago by dropping the gtk3 backend of LO. Don't do that. And even after Xfce has switched to xfce4, I expect Gentoo that gtk4 apps which are not specifically Gnome-only follow gtk4-Xfce style und support gtk4-Xfce themes whereever possible (whatever those styles and themes will be for gtk4, but they will most likely be non-CSD) and not force me to Gnome style or Gnome themes in Xfce. I will not switch to Gnome or accept Gnomish apps, and my students will not. If the gtk situation does not work out nicely, gtk will be replaced by Qt whereever possible (which is what I did for now in libreoffice until the gtk3 LO backend is back), and Xfce will sooner or later be replaced by KDE.
(In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #8) > But outside gnome, what you call "past" will be state of the art for the > next few years, and will be what people still want and expect. asturm is > just way too early with his actions. > What are his actions here, exactly? > My working zenity (which is used by geeqie, a pure gtk3 app) was broken by > dropping the gtk3 version of zenity, and LO was broken just a few days ago > by dropping the gtk3 backend of LO. Don't do that. > I've had the tab open for the two LO bugs for the last few days. I plan on looking at it, but please leave the "don't do that" out of it.
(In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #8) > (In reply to Sam James from comment #7) > > (In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #6) > > > (In reply to Andreas Sturmlechner from comment #3) > > > > Before more bugs like this one and re LibreOffice pop up: The world is not > > > > standing still around your personal preferences of toolkit usage. Much like > > > > I can't be bothered to keep around Qt5-based versions of applications - in > > > > fact we are actively rooting them out wherever possible - I don't think > > > > gnome proj is going to take on the burden of supporting legacy versions here > > > > and in other places. > > > > > > Well, I'm quite surprised that gtk is maintained by the Gnome team in Gentoo. > > > gtk ist *not* the "Gnome toolkit". > > > > > > > Are you really *surprised* by that? It's a gnome.org project and it's > > consumed heavily by GNOME where they often need new features first. > > Yes, I am surprised. > > I know that gtk is developed within the scope of Gnome upstream. > > But within Gentoo, which is proud of being multi-platform and supporting > many desktop environments, I expected gtk to be a collaborative effort of > *all* gtk consumers, respecting and supporting all their individual needs. > I think you expect we have far more developers than we do. But often packages are maintained by the people who have the most interest in it anyway. Not that it would make any difference here...? (What would such a maintainer do?) > But outside gnome, what you call "past" will be state of the art for the > next few years, and will be what people still want and expect. asturm is > just way too early with his actions. I suspect his opinion is coloured by the Qt 5 side of things where we really do need to purge it given it's no longer getting FOSS releases regularly and KDE software doesn't need it anymore. You've also made your point.
> I think you expect we have far more developers than we do. But often > packages are maintained by the people who have the most interest in it > anyway. Not that it would make any difference here...? (What would such a > maintainer do?) The gnome people are interested in gtk4 and in innovations. I appreciate that they do a good job there, and I understand that gtk3 and old styles are not in their interest. Xfce, Mate and some other are interested in a working gtk3, it would be in their interest to maintain a working gtk3. No big innovations or changes needed there, just preserve the current state of gtk3 and provide more or less identical ebuilds for new upsteam versions of gtk3.
(In reply to Sam James from comment #9) > (In reply to Klaus Kusche from comment #8) > > But outside gnome, what you call "past" will be state of the art for the > > next few years, and will be what people still want and expect. asturm is > > just way too early with his actions. > > > > What are his actions here, exactly? He was the one who defended the deletion of gtk3 zenity and the gtk3 LO backend, and he made the impression that it is Gentoo's decision to kill gtk3 as soon as possible, and to focus on the interests (styles, themes, ...) of Gnome only. And he compared gtk3->gtk4 to qt5->qt6 and gtk2->gtk3, which is not correct in my opinion, at least not now and not any time soon.
No, I'm just the messenger. Unfortunately history repeats itself and every toolkit upgrade involves the same tiresome discussions. It is, as I said, a verbatim copy. On the one hand you acknowledge the devpower constraints of upstream projects, on the other hand you expect downstreams to compensate for that, for several years. That doesn't add up, and especially not on a rolling release distribution.
(In reply to Andreas Sturmlechner from comment #13) > No, I'm just the messenger. Unfortunately history repeats itself and every > toolkit upgrade involves the same tiresome discussions. It is, as I said, a > verbatim copy. Perhaps the toolkit developers make bad decisions? (compared e.g. to the infinite backwards compatibility of the linux kernel syscall interface) But unfortunately that's nothing Gentoo can influence in any way... > On the one hand you acknowledge the devpower constraints of upstream > projects, on the other hand you expect downstreams to compensate for that, > for several years. That doesn't add up, and especially not on a rolling > release distribution. As I wrote above: I'm not a developer nor a distribution maintainer, but given the complexity of the gtk3->gtk4 switch e.g. for wxwidgets, I think the amount of manpower (total man-years) needed to maintain and distribute gtk3 in its "as is" state for several years is significantly less than the manpower needed to convert all gtk3 apps / toolkits / desktop environments to gtk4. But of course the manpower is needed in different places.
Please note that this bug is about keeping an old version of a specific graphical utility if maintained by a different team. Discussions about how long gtk3 is going to be maintained, how good or bad upstream is in your humble opinion are and so on are not productive and make us just want to close this bug and effectively lock it down for discussions and go with the initial decision from bug 932185.
