Re: New version of GTK+

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bruce Ide <bruce ide echostar com> writes:
> > > > > > "Havoc" == Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:
>
>     Havoc> GTK 2.0 should come out well before the end of the
>     Havoc> year. However people using the GNOME platform will have to
>     Havoc> wait for gnome-libs etc. to be ported to it, so many apps
>     Havoc> will not be able to use GTK 2.0 until GNOME 2.0 comes out
>     Havoc> sometime next year.
>
> Would you characterize the changes being made to GTK as being
> evolutionary or revolutionary? Are we abandoning a lot of backward
> compatbility for new features, or will many apps still compile with
> the new GTK?

I would say that most apps will compile with minimal changes. Owen
compiled gftp for example without changing anything (other than
changing the Makefile to find the newer GTK version).

There are some fairly large changes, but the deprecated interfaces are
still there, so your code won't break, though updating the code is
recommended.

The main large changes are: 

 a) internationalized/unicode text display (this doesn't affect most
    code, but if you're drawing text to a drawing area you may need to
    change how you draw it to support other languages; if you're
    reading text from a file then feeding it to GTK you need to be
    sure it's in UTF8 and not some other encoding).

 b) new widgets (GtkText, GtkCList/CTree replaced; the old widgets
    are still there, but you should avoid them in newly-written code
    and consider porting old code to the new widgets)

 c) nicer ways of doing things you may have hacked before; for
    example, an "iconified" signal on GtkWindow, a
    gtk_window_present() to raise/deiconify a window, gdk-pixbuf
    support for image loading and manipulation, revamped GtkImage
    which can display various image formats, nicer scrolling support,
    automatic backing store so you don't need anti-flicker hacks,
    stock images, nicer dialog widget, etc.

Havoc