I wondered if it might be possible to get libhandy stable enough to get it merged into this release. That would mak it part of the final GTK 3 release and might enable more projects to the convergence/responsive design earlier. So as a result more native apps earlier on the librem 5.
I never developed any gtk software but what i took form reading about it the GTK team brook the api a lot till the 3.22 release, which kept back many devs form switching for GTK 2 to GTK 3. But now with the stable 3.22 release there are more who are switching. They plan to continue the breaking with GTK 4 thought they want to reach a stable point faster (after 2-3 years) and continue than with GTK 5. More infos on this here: https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-promise-in-gtk/
So if libhandy gets in GTK 4 (which isn’t released yet) it will probably take another 2-3 years+ till it is stable enough to attract the open source projects which can’t handle the constant breaking and therefore wait for the stable release.
So might be a big advantage to have this in GTK 3.
Why do you think there’s a need to merge it upstream so fast?
From my understanding it’s just GTK widgets and those are nicely modular so there’s little value in actually merging it upstream.
If you want a comparison you can compare it with ElementaryOS granite library, they don’t even have plans for merging it upstream (and I am guessing that libhandy doesn’t either in the short-term).
I didn’t know how easy it is to include a GTK widget. My idea was that things that are in the core of a project get adopted faster, so that we get earlier more responsive apps. In some cases the responsiveness might be even use full on desktops for e.g. half screnn display of the email client. So devs implement it and the librem 5 gets adopted apps.
But it was just an idea of me, with absolutely no experience in GUI development and the GTK framework
We want to merge some things into GTK3 while it’s still possible, so you’re on the right track. I heard others talk about libhandy in this context - Guido or Adrien should know better.
I had a talk with Adrien, libhandy won’t be upstreamed in GTK+ 3.24.
GTK+ 3.24 only brings minor modifications and helpers for a migration to GTK+ 4.0
The upstreaming of libhandy into GTK+ 4.0 is of course being discussed, and Purism has no point in not upstreaming it. That said, Tobias said libhandy needed to be polished a bit before being production-ready.
Adrien’s work was already amazing on these widgets
https://blog.gtk.org/2018/06/23/a-gtk-3-update/