mozart-gtk - Farewell?

[Pavel]

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
>
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