Recent deprecations in GTK+ HEAD

[Kristian Rietveld <kris gtk org>]

Good Morning Fellow Hackers,

Some of you might have noticed the recent deprecations in GTK+ HEAD
already. There seems to be some confusion on what is going on and
whether the right things are happening. In this mail I will try to clear
that all up.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

New widgets were designed to replace GtkCombo and GtkOptionMenu. These
new widgets are GtkComboBox and GtkComboBoxEntry. A few weeks back these
new widgets landed in GTK+ HEAD (ie the unstable branch). As a result,
the old widgets GtkCombo and GtkOptionMenu have been deprecated in GTK+
HEAD (ie in the unstable branch).

WHAT IS GOING WRONG?

Applications using either GtkCombo or GtkOptionMenu (or both) will not
compile anymore when the GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED flag is turned on. To
get around this, either port your application to GtkComboBox or turn off
GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED.

When your application is using GtkComboBox from GAL, it will not compile
either. A fix might be to re-namespace GAL's GtkComboBox and continue
using that. Or port over to GtkComboBox. As a reminder, only widgets
included in GTK+ itself should use the GTK+ namespace.

I OBJECT TO THE DEPRECATIONS

You can express your objections on the recent deprecations by sending
mail to gtk-devel-list. Please give arguments why the deprecations
should have been done at a later date, and at which date.


For those interested a 3 second guide to porting simple GtkOptionMenus
to GtkComboBoxes:

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~kris/blaat/why-combo-box-is-cooler-2

Please see gtk+/tests/testcombo.c for the more complicated cases.


I hope that I've cleared up the confusion.


regards,


	-Kris