Out of the whole developer pool? Sure, that's a very small fraction.

Out of the pool of Gtk developers? That's basically saying "Have you done gtk and kept up to date?". It's not really the equivalent of the dreadful "5 years of experience in a JS framework that came out last October".

For a migration job, what else would you suggest as the initial requirements? Sounds okay, although they might have to go down if they find out that e.g. every gtk3 developer moved on to Qt, WinUI or Flutter...

(For generic, long-term positions I'm strictly against too specific requirements, by the way. Actual desktop UI experience would be great, though, even in our current sad state)

If they find out every Gtk3 developer moved to a different framework that's a good sign they should do the same with Inkscape.

More new GTK4 applications have been made in the past year than GTK3 in the previous 5 years. It is a big success.

I dabbled in GTK an afternoon!

You're hired!

and they're already talking about starting GTK5. CADT all the way down.

I’m pretty certain gtk has been evolving with decent migration paths from one version from to the next.

But are those migrations actually happening? I still see many GNOME packages still depend on libgtk-3-0!

What I see in practice is long-running migration projects.

CADT?

"Cascade of Attention Deficit Teens" - it's a phrase coined by jwz (of Mozilla fame) to refer to how some some projects (he specifically targeted GNOME) tend to throw out mature-but-imperfect code and rewrite it from one version to the next rather than addressing bugs and problems in the existing software.

I think it's a little unfair of him to single out young developers, but I have seen the 1.x -> 2.x rewrite before too so he's not wrong overall. If you want to read the original article search for "The CADT Model" - I would link to the article but JWZ shows requests with referer "news.ycombinator.com" an image that you may not like if you're at work :)

edit: oh I just clicked the link someone posted (in a [Dead] comment), it seems he has removed the functionality I described

> edit: oh I just clicked the link someone posted (in a [Dead] comment), it seems he has removed the functionality I described

Your browser probably just doesn’t send the referer header to protect your privacy.

Still has the referrer troll.

Weirdly I am now seeing it again. I don't know what happened :-S

> I would link to the article but JWZ shows requests with referer "news.ycombinator.com" an image that you may not like if you're at work :)

IMO anyone who has not configured their browser not to send cross-domain Referer headers deserves whatever they get. There is no user benefit for this privacy leak and browsers should have trashed it decades ago.

Gregory Casamento needs to build a GNUStep PPA for Ubuntu based distros, it would work great on libre derivatives such as Trisquel. Parabola has badly maintained repos for it, lacking even Gorm and ProjectCenter.

We need a DE for legacy devices as XFCE's development is not a sure thing with further GTK+ releases tied to Gnome and Red Hat.

> I think it's a little unfair of him to single out young developers

Yeah, though I think of “teenage” more as a mindset in this case.

Sometimes it's easier to rewrite a module, given inputs and outputs and a good test suite, than to understand how it works. This is even more true if the original developer is no more available.

Rewriting a whole big library, not easy either way.

Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers, I believe. A coining of jwz's.

Invoked for the tendency to do rewrites instead of maintaining and bug fixing, since rewrites are more "interesting".

Could also be a side coinage if I read it correctly as “Shiny Object Syndrome” , wanting to use the latest new techniques that are in the hype cycle.

good old HTTP referrer at it again

Yep. That's why one of the first things I do when I set up firefox is to go into `about:configs` and change `network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy` to 1.

For context:

0: no restrictions/default

1: only send if base domain matches (i.e. news.ycombinator.com would only include the referrer for *.ycombinator.com links)

2: only send if entire domain matches (i.e. news.ycombinator.com would only include the referrer for news.ycombinator.com links)

I use an extension to always send the base domain of the target as the "Referer" and have not encountered any problems (or at least not any that I cared enough to investigate the cause for). It's absurd that Firefox still has this privacy leak by default considering how much they present themselves as privacy friendly.

Firefox some time recently cracked down on unnecessary referrers but they are still fairly conservative about it because it breaks some sites and if you are too aggressive about it then you end up with users assuming that's firefox not working properly.

Not since FF 87.

CADT would imply this kind of sabotage is not happening on purpose. There are certain parties that have keen interest in a severely dysfunctional FOSS desktop. It's more like GSAW (GNOME Saboteurs At Work).

Hmm. On my current system I have 32 packages installed that depend on libgtk2.0-0; 217 packages that depend on libgtk-3-0 and 62 that depend on libgtk-4-1.

Will I sound like too much of a grumpy user if I express dismay at yet another protracted migration?

I feel like for GTK, there just aren't a lot of resources out there for it. And that links into the fact that GTK is only really used on GNU/Linux which represents an incredibly small share of all desktop users (even though it can be used cross-platform I believe). So its one of those cases where I think to learn it, you kinda have to look at samples, and source code from other projects.

Gtk is multi platform.

Being used more by linux doesn't change its nature, and plenty of stuff you never realized use it in many platforms.

Not entirely true. The resources devoted to making sure the backends for non-Linux platforms are correctly designed and implemented suffer a bit.

I say this as someone using GTK and who was forced to contribute quite a lot of fixes for the macOS backend (in GTK2), because I was one of the few people using it in the way we do on macOS.