Most popular libraries not in the HP

Heinrich Apfelmus apfelmus at quantentunnel.de
Mon Jul 19 04:03:00 EDT 2010


Axel Simon wrote:
> Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
>>
>> I'm on MacOS and it's similar for me. GTK just keeps crashing randomly 
>> or behaving weirdly, reducing the utility of cool tools like  hp2any .
>> 
> The same question: do you mean Gtk2Hs or Gtk+? If it's the former, then 
> we should fix the bugs. We are about to release Gtk 0.11.1 which has 
> hopefully now all the concurrency bugs ironed out. Having cabalized 
> Gtk2Hs, I hope users find the libraries more inviting to send in patches 
> since it's now fairly simple to understand how to build the beast.

I mean Gtk+, though I can't really know, of course. But I have much more 
trust in the Haskell side. :)

>> Even if it's not a native GUI on MacOS, I'd at least accept gtk2hs if 
>> it were bundling a precompiled version of the GTK libraries that just 
>> works (tm).
> 
> I hope that the Aqua port of Gtk+ will mature eventually and that Gtk+ 
> reaches a similar look-and-feel as Qt on the major three platforms. It 
> will never be perfect, but if there's some sort of abstraction for the 
> menu bar and some good themes, then it might be acceptable to most 
> people.

For me, it's mostly a question of stability and "zippiness". I accept 
Gimp but I don't like Inkscape, for example.

> Having Gtk2Hs in the platform would then be very convenient as 
> it would relieve the user from the burden of installing all those 
> different binary libraries. I am not willing to invest the time to 
> provide a Mac and Windows installer just for Gtk2Hs since then I always 
> have to track the ghc and platform releases and opens a lot of different 
> platform problems that cabal currently abstracts for me.

Ah, using cabal for Gtk2Hs is fine, the Haskell side usually works very 
well. What I had in mind is that it ships a compiled version of the 
corresponding Gtk+ libraries, because the real pain on MacOS is to 
install those. There was a precompiled Gtk+ framework if I remember 
correctly, but that one seems to be unsupported nowadays; or one can 
install from source but that takes hours and then you'll run into at 
least one compilation error and throw up your arms in desperation.


Regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com



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