Friday, February 20, 2015

Ubuntu 15.04 Likely to Adopt GTK+ 3.16 With Several Fixes

 Ubuntu developers are working on the 15.04 version of the operating system and some interesting changes have been made so far. The developers will probably adopt GTK+ 3.16, though it was not meant to be.



Ubuntu developers are quite particular with the packages they choose for their system. Till Ubuntu 14.10, many GNOME packages belonged to the 3.10 branch, which are quite old by now. Then in the upcoming Ubuntu 15.04, finally some progress has been made as the 3.14 branch is getting updated. These are not the vanilla packages from GNOME and they are customised to suit the specific Ubuntu profile and its requirements.

Well, having the latest packages from GNOME means certain advantages will be utilised too, just like the latest GTK+ integration. But still Ubuntu developers need to tweak the packages so that they function properly. Some important modifications are also necessary and GTK+ is the most interesting among them. Though adoption of GTK+ 3.16 is interesting enough, developers realised that it would have created many problems that could not have been fixed in due time.

According to a Debian and Ubuntu developer, Iain Lane, "We're thinking about having the released version of GTK3 in 15.04 be 3.16, which is the current in-development version to be released towards the end of March. But the main motivation from our side is that it contains an implementation of overlay scrollbars that will allow us to remove our existing GTK module which is becoming harder and taking longer to maintain over time.”

Several other Ubuntu developers pitched in earlier and it was decided that it would not be a great idea. After a debate was over, Lane gave this message, "We discussed this switch at the desktop team meeting on Tuesday and the consensus amongst those there is that the issues outweigh the benefits of switching, so for now we prefer to stick with what we have for 15.04." 

No comments:

Post a Comment