Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Where is the source?

I'm so pissed off. Hallski just announced that andersca was doing for Imendio a port of Gtk on MacOS X.

What piss me off even more, is that earlier in the year, andersca ordered me to stop working on it because he wanted to start in a few month. I told him no, because each time someone a similar situation occur, the whole project stop; so obviously continuing was the only way to keep a pace, even slow and not waste time ever again. At GUADEC, I wanted to talk to him about that, we never did (he sort of escaped, etc). I did put the code in Gtk CVS because that was the only way to make sure other people could work on it, I never got any feedback. At what point it was said to me that andersca might take another project because he wanted to do that solo (I knew that developers had big ego). Since I never heard from him I assumed he did pick something else. And the announcement that he got commit access to WebKit just led me to think the same.

OK, I haven't worked on it since really, mostly because of lack of time or motivation or a combination of both and of because other priorities like an utterly broken AbiWord on MacOS X (it still is). But I must admit that this is a nice backstabbing and it is really appreciated to see that amongst the GNOME community, there are still people who feel like the need to do so. I personnaly really feel offended as I never hid anything about what I was doing, and what Imendio did behind my back just assume that what I was doing is crap (because they didn't feel like cooperating).

That said, I no longer will be working on that port, because I don't care anymore. Maybe I'll just concentrate on things people give a little bit of appreciation and gratitude, because on that, Imendio, andersca and Hallski showed to be at the complete opposite.

Oh and if you think I'm writing that just because I'm just angry, it is not. In fact I have been mumbling about it for weeks, but I promised my "source", who gave me the info to be honest with me, to STFU. I did.

Since people are asking about GTK+ on Mac, here it is.

I branched CVS off 2.6.7.

cvs rtag -rGTK_2_6_7 gtk-2-6-macosx-branchpoint gtk+
cvs rtag -b -rgtk-2-6-branchpoint gtk-2-6-macosx gtk+

Why this version ? Because I currently don't feel like working on the moving code base that is 2.7, and that using a "bug free" version is probably safer. I'll merge back to 2.7 at some point.

Now, I'm getting all my changes merged into that branch. It leads to nothing that work.

I have implemented GdkDisplay on MacOS X. It is basically a wrapper around NSScreen class and NSApplication for a couple of things. It is probably not complete, like handling the clipboard.

Next will be GdkScreen, a wrapper the NSScren instances.

I also started to write some unit tests, so that with make check I can verify I'm not crashing, and that it works...

I started coding on Gtk MacOS X, and I investigated what they did in XDarwin the rootless XFree X server for MacOS X. I appears that they use Cocoa. So I decided that it my be a solution as I only need event and window management. The graphic layer will be Quartz directly.

Of course see screenshot on the side.

:-) Actually it is one of the "multimedia screen" I saw from outside on the street... crashed.

Today, part of my NDF, I started working on Gtk+ for MacOS X. So I had build a sane environment to get started.

Random caveats:

• Fink only has glib 2.4. So have to build glib and atk as well.
• On MacOS X, it is not LD_LIBRARY_PATH but DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. Go figure why they do it differently on MacOS X, but this is a noticeable difference.
• Freetype2 package from Fink is broken as it put freetype-config somewhere in /sw/lib/freetype2/bin/freetype-config. And no I can't use freetype-config to find freetype-config path unlike someone suggested, as a joke, on #gtk. Playing with PATH helps. Bug 1179574
• CVS needs insane amount of disk space in /tmp. 70MB was not enough to import. I remove tetex as this machine is now head-less...

Here are the steps:

1. get all the dependencies to be build. glib, atk and pango with Freetype2 backend are done.
2. hack the configure to detect MacOS X. Almost done.
3. port gdk by writing and Carbon and CoreGraphics backend.
4. Have all the samples running.
5. Make it a Framework for nice MacOS X integration.
6. Write an ATSUI backend for Pango.
7. Move to gtk 2.8. This may happen sooner depending on the time line.

Sorry, there is no screenshot.

My latest blog about Gtk MacOS X leveraged some questions. I'll try to answer:

Q: Why don't you help GTK-Cocoa guy ?

A: I never said I wouldn't. I'll just investigate that code and see what is good and what can be done. At first sight, two problems. It is a reimplementation of the widget in Cocoa, and it is Gtk+ 1.2.

Q: Why don't you start with Gtk+ 2.8 that has a Cairo backend which has a Quartz back end ?

A: So what do I do with the event management ? AFAIK Cairo does only provide graphic layer. I'd prefer go Quartz straight, with ATSUI for the text.

Corrections:

I took a shortcut saying that Cocoa use Carbon. Sure it does, for menus and to have the same print and file dialogs. But they are both based on CoreFoundation (in fact Cocoa more like interact transparently with CoreFondation), CoreGraphics and ATSUI.

Now, stop talking, start coding.

So I started looking at porting Gtk to MacOS X without requiring X11. Since I don't like reinventing the wheel, I'm looking at what has already been done.

• gtk-osx is a port of Gtk+ 1.2 done using Carbon, for Cinepaint.
• gtk-cocoa as posted in a comment. I didn't know that one, I'll look at it soon.

Now a bunch of Q&A:

Q: Why did you start with Gtk 1.2 ?

A: I didn't I just built gtk-osx which is Gtk+ 1.2. My goal is to port Gtk+ 2.6.

Q: Will you use Cocoa ?

A: I don't think. Several reasons:

• it is too high level
• I plan to reuse gtk-osx which is Carbon code, as it is a port of the old MacOS 8 mac-gtk

And Carbon is faster and much lower-level. Cocoa itself use Carbon.

Q: Will it run on MacOS 9 ?

A: No plan at all. This will be pure MacOS X.

Q: What about Quartz ?

A: I'll use as much as I can instead of QuickDraw, but Quartz lack lot of functionnalities to be exposed.

Q: When will it done ?

A: Don't know. I haven't started to code. And I have AbiWord to work on.

Q: Why do you do that ?

A: I want people to use Gimp on MacOS X, as well as Gnumeric, Evolution and Dia. In fact any of the fantastic Gtk apps we have.

I pulled a tarball of gtk-osx and did rebuild using Project Builder.

Here is the screenshot:

It is only gtk+ 1.2. It is a long way to the end.