[vlc-devel] [RFC] [macOS] Remove Growl support for VLC 4.0

[Marvin Scholz]

Hello,

I want to propose to remove Growl notification support for VLC 4.0. As
maybe some of you noticed yesterday, fixing Growl for 3.x was quite an
amount of work, as Growl has no source tarballs for recent SDK versions.
There is a very old mercurial repo that was not really maintained at all
since 2015, and the repository itself is not even easily clone-able
without some effort. It took me 4 hours to get this fixed for VLC 3.x
and I can imagine a variety of things I could have improved instead,
that are more important than notification bubbles.

The relevance of Growl has faded away, since macOS 10.9 added support
for macOS native user notifications. Given that VLC 4.0 will target
macOS 10.10, there will be no macOS version we target that will not have
the native macOS notifications.

The notification module already supports native notifications right now,
so removing Growl will not cause any big functional changes. Of course
some users will complain, because the benefit that Growl offers is
flexibility. But IMHO this does not justify to keep a unmaintained
framework around, especially with the amount of questionable patches we
need to make it work at all.

Greetings, Marvin Scholz