[Geany-devel] Question about GTK+ version used

Matthew Brush mbrush at xxxxx
Sat Oct 1 11:44:06 UTC 2011


On 11-10-01 03:05 AM, Enrico Tröger wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 01:21:59 -0700, Matthew wrote:

>> So I was just curious *specifically* what distro(s) and version(s)
>> sets the oldest version of GTK+ that Geany should support?
>
> I don't know anything as specific as you probably want to hear, sadly.
> It's just that it raises up from time to time when users tell on what
> old systems they compile Geany.
>

It seems to me like this group of users would be very small and require 
that they are:
   - Enterprise/LTS users running a GUI
   - And who are willing to install unsupported software.
   - And whos distro doesn't backport newer libraries.
   - And who are developers, can compile Geany but can't compile GTK+.
   - And who are not satisfied with existing supported Geany packages.

I would just be curious to know how many (or what percentage of) users 
fall into this group.

> Since we recently bumped the GTK requirements to 2.12 for the upcoming
> release, do we need to discuss this already again?
> Yeah, newer versions are cooler but is it necessary or just cooler?
>

It's not so much about "cool" as it is about using improved versions of 
the libraries.  Lots of good stuff has been added since 2.12 (ie. in the 
last 4+ years of active development).

Just one example would be the GtkBuilder stuff which would not really be 
"cool", but it would make it easier to unglue some of the business logic 
from the GUI stuff and make fixing/developing Geany easier.  Another 
example could be the use of GtkInfoBar, whether and where it might be 
useful is another discussion.

What's more, some existing #if'd code could be fixed to be used proper, 
again making Geany easier to fix/maintain (assuming there's some 
existing #if'd code blocks...I think I saw some).

Another reason, is to make it easier for people to help get Geany able 
to build with GTK+ 3 eventually, which probably many more users will 
care about in the somewhat near future than supporting extremely old 
versions of GTK+ 2.  It would also help to attract new developers to 
Geany if they didn't have to "go back in time" to see what was the way 
to do GTK+ things 4+ years ago.  No one likes writing deprecated code :)

IMO, Geany releases should keep up to date with the versions of 
libraries of mainstream distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Etc.).  It's 
not like the older versions of Geany for older GTK+ versions are going 
to be any less usable over time.

Of course this is just my $0.02 cents as some who has had many good 
ideas for improvements to Geany that have been stopped with needing to 
support ancient GTK+/GLib versions.

Sorry for the long email.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush



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