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List:       gtk-devel
Subject:    Re: Project rename to "GTK"
From:       Owen Taylor via gtk-devel-list <gtk-devel-list () gnome ! org>
Date:       2019-02-14 18:24:20
Message-ID: CAEJK_dhKtVRdk1STuz250jd2mQupp-tnYV-u_40BvwUstJSoMA () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 10:23 AM Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 5:04 AM Emmanuele Bassi via gtk-devel-list
> <gtk-devel-list@gnome.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi all;
> > 
> > tl;dr: GTK is GTK, not GTK+. The documentation has been updated, and the \
> > pkg-config file for the future 4.0 major release is now called "gtk4" 
> > over the years, we had discussions about removing the "+" from the project name. \
> > The "plus" was added to "GTK" once it was moved out of the GIMP sources tree and \
> > the project gained utilities like GLib and the GTK type system, in order to \
> > distinguish it from the previous, in-tree version. Very few people are aware of \
> > this history, and it's kind of confusing from the perspective of both newcomers \
> > and even expert users; people join the wrong IRC channel, the URLs on wikis are \
> > fairly ugly, etc.
> 
> Thanks for moving this along! It's good to see the GTK name finally
> get less confusing and easier to talk about!
> 
> But to clarify the history, the "+" predates the point when GTK was
> moved out of the GIMP tree. Every single version of GTK with publicly
> released sources was called GTK+. As I understand it, Peter Mattis
> added the + to mark a change from a very early version that was
> structured more like Xt/Motif, to a version that had a fuller type
> system with inheritance.

To add a little more to this - Elijah Lynn pointed me to an answer he
obtained from Peter on the subject - see
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/443832/27902 -

    GTK was the first version of the toolkit used in pre-1.0 versions
of the GIMP.
    At some point, the architectural limitations were revealed and I rewrote and
   renamed it as GTK+. This too was used in pre-1.0 versions of the GIMP.
   I don't believe any project outside of the GIMP used GTK-(no-plus).
   Why a "+" instead of a version number? No reason other than whim.
   ~ Peter Mattis
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