pre-built quartz variant packages

[Valerio Messina]

> Il 17/01/2024 03:00 CET Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> ha scritto:
> I agree that the UX surrounding the quartz/x11 choice is bad. 
> Unfortunately it's harder to fix than you might hope, and gtk3 itself 
> may be the easiest part of the puzzle. A number of other ports like 
> glib2 and cairo are also involved, and have to support other dependents 
> that may be using gtk2 or something else entirely. Many intermediate 
> dependencies build differently depending on whether they are built 
> against quartz or x11 variants of their dependencies, so there's a whole 
> chain that has to be managed. Some ports fail to build against quartz 
> dependencies.
> 
> The proposed solution to all of the above is to split everything that 
> both has dependents and is affected by the quartz/x11 choice into two 
> subports. Unfortunately nobody has yet implemented this.

I saw that GTK 4.12 is the stable version, while GTK 3.24 is lastest old stable [1].
To download GTK 2 you have to go to 3.x download page [2] and navigate path up and down to find them. Seems 2.x do not receive update from 2019.

I know that there are still many GTK 2.x based app around (GIMP 2.10.36 too, while imminent GIMP 3.x will be based on GTK3.x), but those shouldn't be the main/default focus of the project.
Like I read for old target HW platform, you should accept fix, but please focus on current libraries.

In my opinion (at least for GTK) macpoprt should target to Quartz variant as default, and keep the Xquartz as "optional". If possible let users to install both. The variants mechanism seems good for its flexibility, plase use it.

Note: Glib is a prerequisite for both GTK2 and 3, I'm not sure but I expect should build independently of the graphics backend used by the upper layers GTK and GDK.

my 2 cents
thank you,
Valerio

[1] https://www.gtk.org/
[2] https://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk+/3.24/