Re: gtk+-2.3/2.4 backwards compatibility

[Jens Ansorg <liste ja-web de>]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 21:31, Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:
>
> > > But there is one other app I use in a Gnome/gtk environment: eclipse
> > > (http://www.eclipse.org). The provided binary stopped working right
> > > after I upated gtk+ form 2.2 to 2.3 (after the updates of glib and pango
> > > before eclipse did still work).
> > > 
> > > I tried to build eclipse from sources (works with gtk+-2.2) but there
> > > were errors during compilation (javac to build the java classes).
> > > 
> > > Now, eclipse is a java app. But it builds on top of gtk for the user
> > > interface on Linux.
> > 
> > Someone talking to me on IRC said that this was a toolbar related
> > issue.
>
> > 
> > Some people were accessing GtkToolbar private data and internal
> > structure in ways we found impossible to support. The GTK+ port of
> > Emacs did this. Also Glade.
>
> The compatibility problems that I know of are:
>
>         - Glade accessed toolbar-internal data structures
>
>         - Emacs did the same thing, but apparently doesn't anymore
>
>         - Both AbiWord and the gtk+ port of Emacs somehow have
>           keyboard focus on the toolbar while allowing keypresses on
>           their main widget.
>
> The last problem also appears in another variant: applications start
> up with keyboard focus on the toolbar. This happens since the new
> toolbar can accept keyboard while the old one couldn't. The result is
> that the toolbar is now often the first keyboard focusable widget in
> the application. Currently the only workaround is for the application
> to explicit call gtk_widget_grab_focus() on the widget they want to be
> focused on startup.
>
> > I don't know if this applies to Eclipse - without information in detail,
> > it's impossible to say. Having this information in detail would be
> > great.
>
> Indeed. I think it's quite possible that the toolbar in its current
> state breaks existing applications. It is always a judgement call
> whether what those applications are doing, is legal, of course, but
> having the information that they are doing it would be great, so we
> can figure out if compatibility workaround are in order.

thanks for the information. I'll head over to the eclipse devs with
that.


--
Jens Ansorg <liste ja-web de>