[Geany-devel] Bumping Geany's GTK minimum requirement to 2.12

Jiří Techet techet at xxxxx
Wed May 4 21:40:17 UTC 2011


2011/5/4 Enrico Tröger <enrico.troeger at uvena.de>:
> Hi,
>
> any objections in increasing the GTK minimum requirement of Geany to
> GTK 2.12 (and GLib 2.16)?
>
> This would make quite some code obsolete and so could be removed.
> Also, it would make it easier to migrate to using Glade 3 with
> GtkBuilder instead of Glade 2 (and in the long term makes getting
> compatible with GTK3 easier, but really, later :D). Though I'd like to
> do this step some time later. Also we could rely on GIO which came with
> GLib 2.16 which should remove some #ifdefs.
>
> I think the current minimum of GTK 2.8 can be increased as GTK 2.12 is
> already about three years old already.
>
> Any objections?

Hi Enrico,

I definitely support that. Last time I was using Glade 2 I had to
modify some system header files because Glade was using some obsolete
interfaces that apparently nobody else used/tested. And this will be
getting worse I'm afraid. Apart from that the UI of Glade 2 is pretty
ugly.

There will still be two options for people on older systems:

1. Use older version of Geany (these people will have to use old
versions of all other software anyway so they are used to it)

2. Compile a newer version of GTK themselves. This is what I do at
work on SLES 9 (which ships with GTK 2.4). Basically you have to
compile pkgconfig, freetype, fontconfig, glib, pixman, cairo, pango,
atk and finally gtk. About 3 hours of work (of which 2.5 hours is
browsing the web while waiting until it gets compiled).

Porting to GTK 3 is pretty straightforward but it really depends how
many GTK2-specific things Geany uses. I can have a look at it once a
GTK3-compatible Scintilla is used by Geany.

Cheers,

Jiri



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