What's the deal with gtkglarea?

[David Morse <dcmorse gmail com>]

What's up with gtkglarea?  The version in Fedora Core 4 has its most
recent ChangeLog entry in 2002.  The author's page for it is 404.  Yet
its popular enough to be in every distro.

I thought I'd test compatibility of my app with Fedora Core 4.  The
compile barfs on this source code (which is ripped DIRECTLY from the
simple.c file in the gtkglarea sources shipped with FC4):


  if (gtk_gl_area_make_current( GTK_GL_AREA( widget ) ))
     ...

with this error:

gnome-window.c: In function coco_realize_callback:
gnome-window.c:290: warning: implicit declaration of function
G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE_CAST.  This comes in the macroexpansion of
GTK_GL_AREA(...).

As alert list-reader Alex Diener pointed out last year on this very
mailing list, getting G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE_CAST defined is no easy
trick.  See http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-app-devel-list/2004-October/msg00010.html
.  I also got stymied by this, and am currently stuck.

I have no problems on Debian Sarge or FreeBSD.  This code even used to
work under Red Hat 8 back in the day.  Just compiling on this
newfangled Fedora Core 4 seems to give problems.  I suspect some
tectonic shift in assumptions I don't see, because I haven't been
paying attention for the last 4 years.

Thank you for your time,
Dave