Re: About GTK+ 3.0 and deprecated things

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:

> >> The 1.x -> 2.0 change was painful for everyone who had an app that
> >> needed porting, however I find it pretty irrelevant in comparison to
> >> 2.x -> 3.0.
> >
> > Well, if no libgtk-compat is planned, it will be about as painful
> > for users of the deprecated and removed widgets/functions.
> 
> Isn't it a little bit exaggerated?
> 
> The GTK+ team wants to remove official support for deprecated 
> things; the larger part of it (from probably a lot of 
> application porting perspectives, and apparently yours) is 
> probably GtkCList and GtkCTree: they were marked deprecated more 
> than 6 years, when GTK+ 2.0 was released (and GtkItemFactory is 
> deprecated in GTK+ 2.4, released more than 4 years ago)...

I think that finally removing code that was deprecated from the 
get-go with GTK+ 2.0 is quite reasonable.  I'm less sure about 
things like GtkItemFactory which were OK till 2.4, and which were 
therefore not part of the (major) porting effort from 1.2 to 2.0.

With GtkItemFactory and GtkAction an additional difficulty is that 
the APIs are apparently quite similar, yet very different in 
important ways.  (The menu-construction code can be modified 
fairly easily, but all callbacks have to be re-written very 
carefully.)  I recently updated my app from GtkItemFactory to 
GtkAction, and not only was it very time-consuming but it 
introduced a large number of subtle bugs which I'm still working 
through.  This is _not_ an easy transition for an app with a 
complex GUI, and that should count for something.

--
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC