Pitch to keep GTK interface

[species5172]

Let me start off with saying that I positively LOVE celestia. What I would like to suggest here is that in order to gain even more popularity (and hence development support), it really needs to fit as many of the popular environments out there as is humanly possible. Linux user base is likely to be a major source of such support, wouldn't you agree?

While KDE is a great desktop, it is perhaps a little too heavy-weight for some of the Linux developers out there, and a non-essential application that depends on KDE may never get installed, thereby reducing the chances of giving some of us the proverbial itch to scratch. Case in point, I attempted to load celestia on my Gentoo Linux machine, and almost gave up when a number of KDE libraries popped up as dependencies. I have gtk (and gtk2) as my primary toolkit, and changing flags allowed me to build celestia with support for those without resorting to a /usr/local install outside of the packaging system.

Documentation for celestia, however, says that gtk is "still" supported and no longer developed, suggesting that this support may be dropped altogether at some point. Should this happen at any time, I, for one, will not upgrade to the version that implements this change and am not very likely to commit considerable time and effort to an application that may require too much of an overhead for me to continue to use it.

So could you PLEASE clarify the status of gtk support in celestia and keep this support going? The fancier features do not have to be there as long as celestia will continue to compile with only gtk (or glut, for that matter) and be usable.

Thank you.

[species5172]

I am, of course, open for any comments in regards to the above.

[selden]

species5172,

The two people (other than Chris) who currently are testing and maintaining Celestia's Linux configurations are running systems with the very most recent KDE environment installed under SuSE and Mandrake. You are asking them to spend a lot of time reconfiguring their systems -- time they'd rather spend enhancing or using Celestia -- or climbing the Alps

While Chris also does some Linux coding, under RedHat, I understand, I think we'd all prefer that he spend most of his time on other aspects of the program

I suspect they'd welcome an addition to the development team who would be interested in maintaining Celestia under a different Linux environment.

[Christophe]

I suspect they'd welcome an addition to the development team who would be interested in maintaining Celestia under a different Linux environment.

That's very true. We'll keep the GTK version as long as possible, we make sure that it still compiles but we're not adding new features in. A new GTK maintainer would be very welcome.

[species5172]

I don't have much experience with graphical interfaces. However, let me peruse the GTK+/Gnome App Development to see if I can get up to speed in a reasonable amount of time.