I've never written anything using GTK, so I don't have an understanding of what's going on in there. But I got this error loading VLC on my Linux desktop.

 ** (.:4905): CRITICAL **: gtk_pizza_set_size: assertion `pizza != NULL' failed

What a deliciously strange error message. 

GTK is one big mess when it comes to function naming schemes.

Sounds like a memory allocation scheme.  I would guess it is a memory pizza divisible into fixed-sized slices?

With pepperoni.
 

I'm hungry.

aythun:

GTK is one big mess when it comes to function naming schemes.

wxWidgets is to blame this time. 

kimos:

I've never written anything using GTK, so I don't have an understanding of what's going on in there.

Save yourself some dain bramage and don't.   GTK in C is a monster of an API.  Essentially, it attempts to create an OOP system in pure C by viciously abusing the C preprocessor.  We have a library setup in the same pattern where I work and it's nasty.  Sooner or later (usually sooner), surfing through tags when trying to find the definition of a string lands you in some horrid, complicated macro and a dead end far away from where you need to be looking.

(I learned a bit of GTK a while back when I thought GUI programming might be interesting, and it did a good job of turning me off to GUI programming in the I-have-to-do-how-much-crap-to-get-a-stupid-button? kind of way.)
 

kimos:

I've never written anything using GTK, so I don't have an understanding of what's going on in there. But I got this error loading VLC on my Linux desktop.

 ** (.:4905): CRITICAL **: gtk_pizza_set_size: assertion `pizza != NULL' failed

What a deliciously strange error message. 

Aside from the odd widget name, this is an old bit of silly noise. Damn near every gtk application generates scads of these assertions, and they don't matter at all. I believe they're generated because a handful of people have some ideas about code being written to follow certain specific rules, which most developers find quite irrelevant, and the first crowd have inserted a bunch of debugging noise to trace certain violations of their pet rules. It's like the guy who insists that every function call have a space before the opening parenthesis, and applies thousands of lines of changes to everybody else's work just to add them.

It's things like this which make me tempted by a policy of "the only permissible warning message terminates the application", on the grounds that it's either important enough to need noticing and fixing or not important enough to bother with at all. It would at least ensure that this kind of nonsense didn't happen.

phaedrus:

(I learned a bit of GTK a while back when I thought GUI programming might be interesting, and it did a good job of turning me off to GUI programming in the I-have-to-do-how-much-crap-to-get-a-stupid-button? kind of way.)  

Nobody has ever accused the gtk/gnome crowd of sanity. More common accusations include "den of crack addicts" and "slavish devotees of emulating every design mistake Microsoft has ever made".

This is what happens when there is no centralized management.

asuffield:

phaedrus:

(I learned a bit of GTK a while back when I thought GUI programming might be interesting, and it did a good job of turning me off to GUI programming in the I-have-to-do-how-much-crap-to-get-a-stupid-button? kind of way.)  

Nobody has ever accused the gtk/gnome crowd of sanity. More common accusations include "den of crack addicts" and "slavish devotees of emulating every design mistake Microsoft has ever made".

Somehow GTK and GNOME are doing just fine despite your accusations. If anything they have far more exposure than QT and KDE.

m0ffx:

asuffield:

Nobody has ever accused the gtk/gnome crowd of sanity. More common accusations include "den of crack addicts" and "slavish devotees of emulating every design mistake Microsoft has ever made".

Somehow GTK and GNOME are doing just fine despite your accusations. If anything they have far more exposure than QT and KDE.

VHS was also doing fine (until DVD). "Doing fine" eg "Being popular" is not synonymous with Quality.

But that's doesn't mean that QT and KDE are quality. I really don't know. 

dhromed:

m0ffx:

asuffield:

Nobody has ever accused the gtk/gnome crowd of sanity. More common accusations include "den of crack addicts" and "slavish devotees of emulating every design mistake Microsoft has ever made".

Somehow GTK and GNOME are doing just fine despite your accusations. If anything they have far more exposure than QT and KDE.

VHS was also doing fine (until DVD). "Doing fine" eg "Being popular" is not synonymous with Quality.

But that's doesn't mean that QT and KDE are quality. I really don't know. 

Well I've not coded with either, but IIRC Qt uses ACTUAL C++, rather than abusing C as apparently GTK does. From my perspective as a user, I prefer KDE, but GNOME has the edge in some areas, e.g. better office software, (I think) a bit smaller memory footprint. In any case neither's going away any time soon. Also KDE is closer to Windows than GNOME is; GNOME I believe takes more of its inspiration from MacOS(X). Yet KDE has the option for the MacOS menu bar placement (at the top of the screen).

Aside: This year I decided to April fool someone by showing them my (PC) laptop running 'OSX' - actually KDE configured to do a quite credible impression. Unfortunately it didn't really work, owing to the prankee being so unfamiliar with OSX that he a) didn't realise how startling OSX on a PC would actually b, and b) didn't notice even blatant giveaways, like the KDE panel unwantedly showing itself. Will have to try it on someone else next year.

kimos:

I've never written anything using GTK, so I don't have an understanding of what's going on in there. But I got this error loading VLC on my Linux desktop.

 ** (.:4905): CRITICAL **: gtk_pizza_set_size: assertion `pizza != NULL' failed

What a deliciously strange error message. 

Pizza allocation failed because of out of cheese error.

MFC is still a lot worse.

Displaying a simple scrollable image (no more than 10 lines of code in Windows Forms, QT, wxWidgets or Swing) was a really difficult task in MFC, requiring 300+ lines of code! Not to mention that some functions return a value while others are void and return something through a reference or pointer! So stuff like

if(window.isvisible()) 

...

works this way:

bool visible;

window.getvisible(&visible);

if(visible)

... 

phaedrus:

kimos:

I've never written anything using GTK, so I don't have an understanding of what's going on in there.

Save yourself some dain bramage and don't.   GTK in C is a monster of an API.  Essentially, it attempts to create an OOP system in pure C by viciously abusing the C preprocessor.  We have a library setup in the same pattern where I work and it's nasty.  Sooner or later (usually sooner), surfing through tags when trying to find the definition of a string lands you in some horrid, complicated macro and a dead end far away from where you need to be looking.

(I learned a bit of GTK a while back when I thought GUI programming might be interesting, and it did a good job of turning me off to GUI programming in the I-have-to-do-how-much-crap-to-get-a-stupid-button? kind of way.)
 

On the other hand, GTKmm (the GTK bindings for C++) is definitely the best C++ GUI system I have ever used. Part of the reason for this is the GObject system that, while a pain in C, provides a very good base for binding to OO languages, hence the availability of good bindings for C++, .Net, Python, etc.
 

phaedrus:

kimos:

I've never written anything using GTK, so I don't have an understanding of what's going on in there.

Save yourself some dain bramage and don't.   GTK in C is a monster of an API.  Essentially, it attempts to create an OOP system in pure C by viciously abusing the C preprocessor.  We have a library setup in the same pattern where I work and it's nasty. ...

A bit of interesting history: Objective-C* originally did the exact same thing before there were any "real" Obj-C compilers.
 

* the strict superset of C which adds Smalltalk-style classes and message sending to ANSI C

m0ffx:

Yet KDE has the option for the MacOS menu bar placement (at the top of the screen).

I hope you don't mean to imply that you think GNOME doesn't... mine's there right now ;) 

db2:

kimos:

I've never written anything using GTK, so I don't have an understanding of what's going on in there. But I got this error loading VLC on my Linux desktop.

 ** (.:4905): CRITICAL **: gtk_pizza_set_size: assertion `pizza != NULL' failed

What a deliciously strange error message. 

Pizza allocation failed because of out of cheese error.

FONTINA_NOT_FOUND?

m0ffx:

I prefer KDE, but GNOME has the edge in some areas, e.g. better office software,

I'm not sure what you mean. KDE and GNOME are shells. The equivalent of Explorer.exe. They don't "have" software. Am I off base?

dhromed:

m0ffx:

I prefer KDE, but GNOME has the edge in some areas, e.g. better office software,

I'm not sure what you mean. KDE and GNOME are shells. The equivalent of Explorer.exe. They don't "have" software. Am I off base?

Yes.  KDE and GNOME also provide a window management layer for applications, more analogous to MFC. 

henke37:

This is what happens when there is no centralized management.

No, it's what happens when the management is on crack. 

dhromed:

m0ffx:

I prefer KDE, but GNOME has the edge in some areas, e.g. better office software,

I'm not sure what you mean. KDE and GNOME are shells. The equivalent of Explorer.exe. They don't "have" software. Am I off base?

Actually the GNOME project tries to supply a desktop.  the actual windowmanager is called metacity.

Heron:

m0ffx:

Yet KDE has the option for the MacOS menu bar placement (at the top of the screen).

I hope you don't mean to imply that you think GNOME doesn't... mine's there right now ;) 

AFAIK from my experience and some googling, you need a third-party extension to get it in GNOME. It's been in KDE for ages, systemsettings > desktop > behaviour. Though it doesn't work for non-kde apps. Note that I mean the application's menu bar, not the global one with "Applications Places Desktop" etc that GNOME usually has by default. If GNOME's added the feature, it's pretty recent, so my point that a desktop commonly considered more inspired by OSX lacked this still stands.

dhromed:

m0ffx:

I prefer KDE, but GNOME has the edge in some areas, e.g. better office software,

I'm not sure what you mean. KDE and GNOME are shells. The equivalent of Explorer.exe. They don't "have" software. Am I off base?

KDE and GNOME are primarily projects to create a desktop environment, but also the libraries for applications to use. Thus they both very much 'have' software, in that software can be written using the KDE or GNOME libraries, and will thus generally work better with their 'own' environment, though they will run under any window manager. Also both the KDE and GNOME projects develop office software - KOffice and Gnumeric (I think Abiword is third-party).

m0ffx:

Aside: This year I decided to April fool someone by showing them my (PC) laptop running 'OSX' - actually KDE configured to do a quite credible impression. Unfortunately it didn't really work, owing to the prankee being so unfamiliar with OSX that he a) didn't realise how startling OSX on a PC would actually b, and b) didn't notice even blatant giveaways, like the KDE panel unwantedly showing itself. Will have to try it on someone else next year.

Check out osx86
 

m0ffx:

Also both the KDE and GNOME projects develop office software - KOffice and Gnumeric (I think Abiword is third-party).

Do these projects have anything to do with openoffice.org?

AFAIK, OOo has been ported to both desktops, but OOo isn't truly free (as in speech) software. 

belgariontheking:

m0ffx:

Also both the KDE and GNOME projects develop office software - KOffice and Gnumeric (I think Abiword is third-party).

Do these projects have anything to do with openoffice.org?

No. KOffice is probably better, but only if you're already using KDE. 

m0ffx:

dhromed:

I'm not sure what you mean. KDE and GNOME are shells. The equivalent of Explorer.exe. They don't "have" software. Am I off base?

KDE and GNOME are primarily projects to create a desktop environment, but also the libraries for applications to use. Thus they both very much 'have' software, in that software can be written using the KDE or GNOME libraries, and will thus generally work better with their 'own' environment, though they will run under any window manager. Also both the KDE and GNOME projects develop office software - KOffice and Gnumeric (I think Abiword is third-party).

I am informed. 

m0ffx:

Also both the KDE and GNOME projects develop office software - KOffice and Gnumeric (I think Abiword is third-party).

both KDE and GNOME have there own office suite. as mentioned above, KDE has Koffice.
GNOME has the GNOME office. On the topic of third-party or not, well its a difficult one, because gnome doesn't really owns anything. A application can simply be "blessed" by GNOME, and then its a gnome application. However the actual developers of the application can quite happily switch to QT for there next version, gnome doesn't really own it or anything.

Simply said, if a application uses the gnome libraries to do stuff, and integrates nicely with gnome, and distro's start shipping it with the gnome desktop, at one point someone will wake up start saying its a gnome application.He might get a SVN account, or his blog aggregated at p.g.o, or whatever. But there is no real "stamp" of approval, although there are some guidelines. (HIG, gnome lib use, etc.. etc..)

Its no where near black and white, its perhaps not even grey.

belgariontheking:

Do these projects have anything to do with openoffice.org?

AFAIK, OOo has been ported to both desktops, but OOo isn't truly free (as in speech) software. 

Why isn't OOo "truly" free? it uses the LGPL, which to my understanding has the FSFs blessing of being a free license.

stratos:

belgariontheking:

Do these projects have anything to do with openoffice.org?

AFAIK, OOo has been ported to both desktops, but OOo isn't truly free (as in speech) software. 

Why isn't OOo "truly" free? it uses the LGPL, which to my understanding has the FSFs blessing of being a free license.

Trademark issues maybe, like the whole Firefox/Iceweasel malarkey?. Also, I believe at present Sun own all the copyright to their version, and have been turning down various patches and improvements. Which has resulted in Novell creating a fork, with improvements that Sun rejected. Oh, and quite a few features depend on Java, and won't work with Free implementations, only Sun's non-Free one.

m0ffx:

stratos:

belgariontheking:

Do these projects have anything to do with openoffice.org?

AFAIK, OOo has been ported to both desktops, but OOo isn't truly free (as in speech) software. 

Why isn't OOo "truly" free? it uses the LGPL, which to my understanding has the FSFs blessing of being a free license.

Trademark issues maybe, like the whole Firefox/Iceweasel malarkey?. Also, I believe at present Sun own all the copyright to their version, and have been turning down various patches and improvements. Which has resulted in Novell creating a fork, with improvements that Sun rejected. Oh, and quite a few features depend on Java, and won't work with Free implementations, only Sun's non-Free one.

Well i would say Sunoffice isn't openoffice, and if novell also offers there patches upstream i don't really have a problem with them also forking it. its what distro's do or something.
But i'm pretty liberal about free software. more OSI then FSF i guess.

But wasn't SUN's Java covered by GPL, or at least the core of java? 

To be honest though, i don't really give a crap about OOo, while i think its nice to have as a alternative when people expect you to have a "office" suite, i think the basic idea of having a office suite is a bit broken anyway. I much rather have seperate programs that try to do just one thing. Developing a suite is just too big a scope for one project, especially when its free software.

It hinders the ability to release early and release often, and also widens the scope of the project by a couple of miles, which especially in a open source project means that a part of the project can get orphaned, because the developer(s) that worked on it, found something new more exciting too do and thus potentially crippling the whole suite.

The added benefit of having separate applications that integrate a lot with each other is IMHO not that big a point. I hardly ever use it, and if i use it (merging letters from word, with data from excel or incorporating graphs from excel into a report written in word) i could have found different ways to do it.

And while i understand why OOo doesn't want to stray away from MSoffice too far, i think there are a lot of things that should get a different approach. *cough*Presenter/powerpoint*cough*

Heron:

m0ffx:

Yet KDE has the option for the MacOS menu bar placement (at the top of the screen).

I hope you don't mean to imply that you think GNOME doesn't... mine's there right now ;) 

That's not the menu bar. The menu bar contains "file, edit, view" etc for your applications. That is a panel with a few menus in it.

stratos:

*cough*Presenter/powerpoint*cough*

I've been taught and lectured by many people in my time, and found that quite often, the most effective are those using the old technology. Like the old style OHPs, that use written or printed transparencies. They're several times brighter than digital projectors for a start, which means the lights can stay on or the blinds open, which in turn means less tendency for the audience to doze. And it's dead easy for the lecturer to add annotations and notes in real time.

I also had a 6th form maths teacher who would project from the laptop (graphs usually) onto a normal whiteboard, and then annotate using the ordinary marker. Might sound a bit WTFey but it worked very well.