GTK+ 3, Win32 and GtkApplication (DBus woes)

[Kean Johnston <kean johnston gmail com>]

Hello everyone,

I am new to this list and I am attempting to write my first GTK+ 
application. For a change of pace, I decided to do my primary development 
on Windows instead of Linux, as the particular application I am writing 
will most likely be run most often on Windows. I chose GTK+ as the toolkit 
to use because of its portability, especially it's advertised portability 
to Windows and MacOS.

Please bear in mind that my perspective is not that of a GTK+ developer 
(although I will have a few patches for Win32 forthcoming soon) but rather 
as a consumer, and a new one at that, so all I have to go on is the 
provided documentation. Very early on in my reading, I was encouraged to 
not manually construct widgets but to use GtkUIManager, and tools like Glade.

I compiled Glade 3.9.2 and because it used GtkApplication, it no longer 
works on Windows. Gio aborts with "Cannot determine session bus address 
(not implemented for this OS)" because DBus support isn't complete in Gio. 
As I read the code this is unavoidable. Therefore, as things currently 
stand, if an application uses GtkApplication, it cannot ever run on Win32. 
An application can't ever use Glade for designing its UI either, because 
Glade uses GtkApplication. This really feels like an unintended consequence.

I read the thread in the archives that started with a discussion on 
argc/argv (that devolved into discussions of other tools and not the core 
issue), as well as a rename of the thread that seemed to indicate DBus 
support could be added but that it would involve dbus daemons and spawner 
and such, which is fine if all you are writing is OS applications, but if 
Glib/Gtk are meant to be real portable toolkits for applications, then 
requiring such an overhead is untenable. As things currently stand, I just 
don't think Glib/Gtk can realistically claim to support Win32 (for anything 
but a subset of their functionality).

Is there any way that a GtkApplication can be marked (some flag or such) as 
to not require DBus? Since the author of Glade was a frequent commentator 
on the previous thread about this, is there any way of not requiring 
g_application_run() (which starts the whole DBus mess)?

Any help / guidance appreciated, and I have development cycles I can spare 
to help test or possibly even implement changes.

Regards and thank you for your time and a phenomenal set of tools.

Kean Johnston