Re: How to make a simple selector item

[Robert Pearce <rob bdt-home demon co uk>]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Jonathon Jongsma <jonathon jongsma gmail com> wrote 
:
> This is a very common mis-understanding.  The 2.4 you see is actually
> part of the library name and indicates the API/ABI version.
> Basically, the API/ABI of gtkmm was broken between version 2.2 and
> 2.4, but hasn't been broken since then, so all new releases are
> backwards compatible with the 2.4 release.  And the ListViewText was
> added in gtkmm-2.4 version 2.10.  Does that make sense?  I know it's
> rather confusing, but gtkmm (and other gnome platform libraries) tend
> to add an api version number to their name when API breaks so that
> they can be installed in parallell.  Gtk+ also does this, but hasn't
> broken API since 2.0, so the newest version of GTK is called gtk+-2.0
> version 2.10.x.

Right, OK. But the Gtk documentation makes it a LOT clearer which 
version of GTK-2.0 is referred to (and I think the common 2.0 is much 
less confusing than 2.4 anyway). In particular, the GTK documentation 
explicitly declares itself as for version 2.12 and only mentions 2.0 in 
the context of "lots of files and directories are called that".

For another useful hint, the Python documentation (which doesn't do the 
confusing thing in the first place) takes to trouble to note on each 
class/method/library which version it appeared in (unless it was there 
in 1.6, which is ancient history now).

Just a couple of thoughts for the documentation maintainers, on how to 
reduce the common-ness of this misunderstanding.
--
Rob Pearce                       http://www.bdt-home.demon.co.uk

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