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Here comes GTK4? Is the current D-Rats GTK3 work going to be mostly compatible?


 

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Hey Everyone,

I saw this today from the Debian bug tracking system and the hits of start of removing GTK2.? Read the details here as it seems that even GTK4 is just around the corner.? Does anyone know if all this GTK3 work will be mostly compatible with GTK4?

--David
KI6ZHD


Your message dated Wed, 13 Oct 2021 20:23:02 +0000
with message-id <E1makmE-000104-0H@...>
and subject line Bug#967595: fixed in libzia 4.32-1
has caused the Debian Bug report #967595,
regarding libzia: depends on deprecated GTK 2
to be marked as done.

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If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
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ForwardedMessage.eml
Subject:
libzia: depends on deprecated GTK 2
From:
smcv@...
Date:
08/04/2020 03:52 AM
To:
maintonly@...

Source: libzia
Severity: normal
User: pkg-gnome-maintainers@...
Usertags: gtk2 oldlibs
Control: block 947713 by -1

This package has Build-Depends on GTK 2 (libgtk2.0-dev), or produces
binary packages with a Depends on GTK 2.

GTK 2 was superseded by GTK 3 in 2011 (see
). It no longer receives any significant
upstream maintenance, and in particular does not get feature development
for new features like UI scaling on high-pixel-density displays (HiDPI)
and native Wayland support. GTK 3 is in maintenance mode and GTK 4 is
approaching release, so it seems like a good time to be thinking about
minimizing the amount of GTK 2 in the archive.

GTK 2 is used by some important productivity applications like GIMP, and
has also historically been a popular UI toolkit for proprietary software
that we can't change, so perhaps removing GTK 2 from Debian will never be
feasible. However, it has reached the point where a dependency on it is
a bug - not a release-critical bug, and not a bug that can necessarily
be fixed quickly, but a piece of technical debt that maintainers should
be aware of.

A porting guide is provided in the GTK 3 documentation:


Some libraries (for example libgtkspell0) expose GTK as part of their
API/ABI, in which case removing the deprecated dependency requires
breaking API/ABI. For these libraries, in many cases there will already
be a corresponding GTK 3 version (for example libgtkspell3-3-0), in which
case the GTK 2-based library should probably be deprecated or removed
itself. If there is no GTK 3 equivalent, of a GTK 2-based library,
maintainers should talk to the dependent library's upstream developers
about whether the dependent library should break API/ABI and switch
to GTK 3, or whether the dependent library should itself be deprecated
or removed.

A few packages extend GTK 2 by providing plugins (theme engines, input
methods, etc.) or themes, for example ibus and mate-themes. If these
packages deliberately support GTK 2 even though it is deprecated, and
they also support GTK 3, then it is appropriate to mark this mass-filed
bug as wontfix for now. I have tried to exclude these packages from
the mass-bug-filing, but I probably missed some of them.

Regards,
    smcv


 

On 10/13/2021 4:43 PM, David Ranch wrote:

Hey Everyone,

I saw this today from the Debian bug tracking system and the hits of
start of removing GTK2. Read the details here as it seems that even GTK4
is just around the corner. Does anyone know if all this GTK3 work will
be mostly compatible with GTK4?
No real way to tell until we try GTK4.

An example is in mapdisplay.py.

The menu handling code from GTK-2 still works, but is deprecated in GTK-3, I think I went through two levels of deprecated methods to find what the current practice is, and it appears to be deprecated in GTK-4.

And I have not yet determined what is the supported method in GTK-4 and it it can be used in GTK-3.

While there is a porting guide from GTK-2 to GTK-3, I have not really found it to be very helpful. Much of the code in D-rats does not match what is in the porting guide or online examples.

As I posted before, for mapdisplay, I am going to start a rewrite of it, as the methods of doing that type of graphics displays has completely changed from GTK-2. So I am going to have to learn the new method a bit at a time.

73,
-John
wb8tyw@... /