Re: Compile time GTK+ 3 version check

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Ardhan Madras <ajhwb knac com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
>        I want to port my application to GTK+ 3, but I don't want to broke
> with GTK+ 2 API and ABI, what is the best way to determine GTK+ 3 version in
> compile time?
>
> Does
>
> #if GTK_MAJOR_VERSION == 3
>
> enough for it?

I like to use the GTK_CHECK_VERSION (maj, min, micro) macro for that
kind of check.

Depending on your project, you might not want to maintain the identical
source tree to compile for GTK+2 and GTK+3... the techniques you will
end up using for GTK+3 might be different from the techniques you used
with GTK+2, in which case it's not a matter of calling one function from
GTK+2 or another for GTK+3 (for instance, if your custom widget implements
->size_request() for GTK+2, it needs to implement a set of different functions
for GTK+3)... so you might easily end up with a big mess of #ifdef hell.

On the other hand if your application consists of a simple dialog with
a couple buttons, it might make sense to use #if statements at pre-processing
time.

Anyway, with a good VCS you should be able to easily maintain an old GTK+2
branch of your project and easily backport the fixes which apply from your new
GTK+3 branch back into the old source base (and avoid the whole #ifdef mess
easily enough).

Cheers,
         -Tristan