mozart-gtk - Farewell?

[Boriss Mejias]

Hi Kevin,

We don't have the human resources here at UCL to carry on with the development
of gtk, so I think that the suggestion of Pavel is quite reasonable.

cheers
Boriss

Pavel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> While I don't know much about GTK I believe that porting to GTK 2 would 
> take a significant amount of time. Since there appears to be noone 
> taking care of the project full time it's unlikely we'll get a working 
> version soon. So I would say that dumping it now and then recreating it 
> if and when we have a working binding to gtk2 would be a good idea.
> /pavel
> 
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:54:02 +0100, Kevin Glynn <kevin.glynn at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Mozart lovers,
>>
>> I am writing about the future of the Mozart GTK binding.
>>
>> The following is just my understanding of the situation, I know very
>> little about GTK or this binding so please correct me where I am wrong
>> so that we have all the information to make a good decision.
>>
>> Mozart GTK is a native library that links Mozart apps to the GTK+ 1
>> library. It was originally developed for the purposes of Alice when
>> they were using Mozart as their virtual machine.
>>
>> GTK has moved on and GTK 1 has been mothballed for a long time, GTK is
>> now at (incompatible) version 2.
>>
>> GTK 1 libraries are being removed from Debian, and so the mozart-gtk
>> Debian package will be removed too, either by my request, or by
>> default if I do nothing.
>>
>> mozart-gtk has an 'interesting' build process. It includes a C header
>> file parser, and it generates the bindings to Oz automatically from
>> the installed GTK header files.  This is neat technology, but it is
>> also very fragile, the parser is sufficient for a subset of C, but as
>> the C header files evolve this parser often breaks and has to be fixed
>> up. See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=419692 for
>> the latest instance of this.
>>
>> I also note that the documentation for mozart-gtk is missing:
>>
>>  http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/add-ons/
>>
>> and nonone seems to have noticed.
>>
>> So, can anyone step up and fix mozart-gtk?  Can anyone port it to GTK
>> 2? Can anyone rescue an improve the technology to automatically create
>> native functors from C header files?
>>
>> Otherwise, I will ask for mozart-gtk's removal from Debian unstable
>> (and thus the next Debian / Ubuntu release) in a week's time.
>>
>> I am also doubtful that it will be possible to release it as part of
>> Mozart's next release (but that is not my call).
>>
>> Thanks for any comments, advice, help.
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>> _________________________________________________________________________________ 
>>
>> mozart-users mailing list                               
>> mozart-users at mozart-oz.org
>> http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-users
> 
> 
> _________________________________________________________________________________ 
> 
> mozart-users mailing list                               
> mozart-users at mozart-oz.org
> http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-users