This is sad, especially in the context that at one point the GNOME/GTK
developers didn't know or care about apps outside of their project:

https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/

Scroll down a ways you'll find the following gem from a GNOME dev (read
the whole thing, it's enlightening):

"mccann replies:

    I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or
    an XFCE app unfortunately. I’m sorry that this is the case but it
    wasn’t GNOME’s fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have
    no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.

    It is my hope that you are a GNOME app…"

Granted, this is from over three years ago and things may have improved
markedly since then (ahem). It is telling that a developer of software
ostensibly for the Linux desktop is unaware of any project outside the
project he is involved in. This unfortunate state of affairs exists
when development is not coming from the community but from hired guns
whose interest is apparently not aligned with the community. It is also
unfortunate that there was apparently no interest in how changes
affected other projects.

As for alternatives, there are not many. Qt can be used independently
of KDE just as GTK+ can ostensibly be used independently although my
sense is that the Qt developers may be more sensitive to projects
outside of KDE. There is FLTK which lacks support for theming in the
fashion of Qt and GTK+ and is a C++ library like Qt. Google has its own
toolkit for Chrome browser called Aura, but I'm not sure if it's
available for independent projects.

Oh well, Ncurses is rather stable. ;-)

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

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