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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

A couple humorous takes on this:

I swear that my initial reading of the title was "74 Decades Later", and I smiled because it fitted the feeling of how late this addition is arriving. Then I realized it'd be a bit strange that they used this kind of snarky sarcasm on their own blog, and had to re-read again the title.

Also,

> This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite ...

read to me as

> this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago

I know HNers are very sceptical of the technical merits (or their lack thereof) that ground-up rewrites usually have. I only hope in some years, GTK 5 or 6 doesn't decide to trash all this work and starts from scratch again.

Regardless, my congratulations to the people who pushed through and contributed their effort to make thumbnails back!

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> this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago

The whole "we needed to rewrite everything" is complete nonsense anyway. There are THREE patches posted on the issue tracker over a period of more than 10 years. They work well, too; people have maintained out-of-tree patches for this (IIRC there's even an AUR package for it in Arch Linux).

GTK developers simply chose to ignore this. They explicitly solicited patches in that issue and then ignored those patches. Not "this patch needs work", just nothing. I get that reviewing patches is work too, but you can't solicit patches for an often-requested feature and then just ignore them. Well, you can, obviously, but it makes you an asshole. When a few years later someone pointed out the latest patch on GitLab it got shot down with a shitty snide "we're not going to look at random patches" comment and had the topic lock (it was on the old/now-deprecated BugZilla).

But hey, got to have some historical revisionism to justify your shitty toxic behaviour towards volunteers and users.

I had a patch rejected after being told "patches welcome", for lacking detailed user testing or not matching any official user stories or something (which is BS, the rationale was just as good as anything), only for the person who rejected it to later implement the same feature just because it "feels" better. Years later after they forgot of course, otherwise they would have kept the feature unimplemented out of stubborn spite.

I feel pretty salty about it. Don't say patches welcome if they're not, and don't apply selective burdens of evidence in favour of including a particular change.

Some of them have huge egos and are stubborn as anything. If something wasn't their idea originally it can be a real uphill battle regardless of how sensible it is. Convince them it was their idea and suddenly the gates are open.

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