General Information =================== This is GTK+ version 2.24.32. GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off projects to complete application suites. GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the licensing terms for GTK+, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all developers, including those developing proprietary software, without any license fees or royalties. The official ftp site is: ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk The official web site is: http://www.gtk.org/ Information about mailing lists can be found at http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html Installation ============ See the file 'INSTALL' Release notes for 2.20 ====================== * GtkStatusbar now has a message area (see gtk_status_bar_get_message_area) which makes it easy to place additional widgets inside the statusbar frame or to replace the label widgets. Previously, this was only possible by accessing the innards of the statusbar widget directly. Applications which are doing so may need some adjustments, since the addition of the message area changed the internal widget hierarchy. * GtkBuilder no longer sets the "name" property of widgets to the ID attribute of the <object>. Use gtk_buildable_get_name() instead of gtk_widget_get_name() to obtain the ID. * GTK+ now includes introspection data, as a consequence, it gained a dependency on gobject-introspection. It is possible to build without introspection by passing --disable-introspection to configure. Release notes for 2.18 ====================== * gtk_tooltip_set_custom now accept a NULL custom_widget to unset the old custom_widget. Custom_widget does not get destroyed when the tooltip goes away. * JPEG2000 support is no longer enabled by default. It must be explicitly turned on, by passing --with-libjasper to configure. * GDK has been reworked to implement 'client-side windows'. This offers exciting new possibilities, such as transformed, offscreen rendering, but it breaks some long-standing assumptions that applications may have about GDK windows. Setting the environment variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS makes GDK create a native X11 window for each GDK window, which might make problematic applications work better. * GTK+ calls signal (SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN) during initialization, to ignore SIGPIPE signals, since these are almost never wanted in graphical applications. If you do need to handle SIGPIPE for some reason, reset the handler after gtk_init(), but notice that other libraries (e.g. libdbus or gvfs) might do similar things. Release notes for 2.16 ====================== * Password entries now display a caps-lock warning. This can be turned off with the caps-lock-warning property. * Various orientation-related functions have been deprecated in favour of the new GtkOrientable interface: gtk_scale_button_get_orientation, gtk_scale_button_set_orientation, gtk_toolbar_set_orientation. * The action-proxy interaction has been changed. Widgets that operate as proxies have to implement the GtkActivatable interface now. GtkActivatable implementation are responsible for syncing their appearance with the action and for activating the action. All GTK+ widgets that are commonly used as proxies implement the GtkActivatable interface. * The handling of keyboard shortcuts has been changed, to help with a longstanding complaint about the way GTK+ handles multiple layouts. GTK+ now only uses keys from groups other than the current group if they are not present in the current group. Release notes for 2.14 ====================== * gtkitemfactory.h is now completely deprecated. As gtkactiongroup.h and gtkstock.h no longer include the gtkitemfactory.h header, this might break application using gtk_item_factory_* symbols without including gtkitemfactory.h - even though this behaviour has never been supported in the first place. * The GtkFileSystem semi-private interface has been removed. The GTK+ filechooser implementation now uses GIO directly, which has rendered external filesystem implementations unnecessary. Consequently, the GtkFileSystem interface is no longer available, nor the filechooser will load any GtkFileSystem implementation. * GtkComboBox now renders the popdown button insensitive when the model is empty. Applications which want to populate the list only before displaying it can set gtk_combo_box_set_button_sensitivity to GTK_SENSITIVITY_ON, so that the button is always sensitive or GTK_SENSITIVITY_OFF to make it insensitive respectively. * In the early 2.14.x releases, GtkAdjustment was changed to enforce that values are restricted to the range [lower, upper - page_size]. This has always been the documented behaviour, and the recommended practice is to set page_size to 0 when using adjustments for simple scalar values, like in a slider or spin button. Due to the large number of applications that are affected by this change, the behaviour has been reverted to the old behaviour in 2.14.3, with an explicit warning that this change will be reintroduced in 2.90. * gdk-pixbuf will use GIO for mime type detection if possible. For this to work, shared-mime-info needs to be installed and XDG_DATA_DIRS set accordingly at configure time. Otherwise, gdk-pixbuf falls back to its built-in sniffing implementation. Release notes for 2.12 ====================== * gtk_about_dialog_get/set_name() were deprecated in favour of gtk_about_dialog_get/set_program_name(), the GtkAboutDialog now uses the "program-name" property instead of the conflicting "name" property. * The gdk-pixbuf tiff loader now requires libtiff 3.6.0 or later. * Support for Windows 9x/ME has officially been removed. It hasn't worked since 2.6 anyway. * The GtkTextBufferTargetInfo enumeration values have been changed from G_MAXUINT-0, G_MAXUINT-1, G_MAXUINT-2, etc, to -1, -2, -3 to stay within ANSI C limits. * A change in the handling of _NET_WM_USER_TIME properties on toplevel windows can cause deadlock problems with window managers that are using GDK for drawing decorations. In particular, metacity <= 2.18.0 is affected by this. The problem has been fixed in metacity 2.18.1. * Semi-private GtkTextLayout api has changed: new GtkTextLayout method invalidate_cursors(), and new functions gtk_text_layout_invalidate_cursors() and gtk_text_layout_cursors_changed(), which should be used in place of gtk_text_layout_invalidate() and gtk_text_layout_changed() if invalidation is due to marks moved or changed selection; new GtkTextLineDisplay structure member. Source compatibility is preserved; binary compatibility may break only if GtkTextLineDisplay structure was created on stack or as a part of another structure (in particular GnomeCanvas and its clones do not need recompiling). * Another new signal has been added to GtkNotebook. The new signal is called create-window, so this name can no longer be used for signals in objects derived from GtkNotebook. * The gtk_notebook_set/get_group_id() functions were found to be insufficient and have been deprecated in favour of gtk_notebook_set/get_group(). * The move-focus signal has been moved to GtkWidget, to unify the various implementations of this signal in specific widgets. Great care has been taken to make sure that all code using this signal continues to work. * An unused and hardly visible GtkFrame has been removed from the menu widget hierarchy when GtkComboBox::appears-as-list style property is set. Any RC file applying a different style to any widget below the widget path "gtk-combobox-popup-window.GtkFrame" should take into account that the frame no longer exists. * The external print preview application used by GtkPrintOperationPreview is now passed the print settings on the command line with the --print-settings parameter pointing to a temp file containing the settings. The preview application assumes ownership of the file and should delete it once it does not need it anymore. The --print-settings commandline option is understood by Evince 0.9.0 and newer. To use a different print preview application, change the gtk-print-preview-command setting in your gtkrc file, e.g. gtk-print-preview-command = "ggv %f" * GtkMenuShell is now defined as an abstract type. It was already documented as an abstract class, and there is little reason to instantiate it. * The GtkTooltips struct (this is the old tooltips API) is now considered private. Code that used to access this struct, in particular the tips_data_list field, will need to change. All of the old tooltips API has been deprecated in favour of a new implementation and API. This affects all of the gtk_tooltips_ functions, and functions which take a GtkTooltips argument, such as gtk_tool_item_set_tooltip() and gtk_menu_tool_button_set_arrow_tooltip(). * The memory management of the GtkRecentManager object has been changed, as using the screen didn't guarantee that the singleton instance was correctly destroyed. The screen-related functions have been deprecated, and should not be used anymore; the GtkRecentManager instance returned by the gtk_recent_manager_get_default() function is guaranteed to be valid for the entire lifetime of an application. * A number of interfaces that have been superseded by newer interfaces for a long time have finally been deprecated. This includes gtk_widget_ref/unref(), gtk_rc_style_ref/unref() and the old file selector. * The various coordinate systems in use in GtkTreeView widgets have been clarified in the documentation, and in the cause of doing so, the functions gtk_tree_view_widget_to_tree_coords() and gtk_tree_view_tree_to_widget_coords() have been deprecated in favour of a new family of gtk_tree_view_convert_ functions. * gtk_menu_item_remove_submenu() has been deprecated in favour of gtk_menu_item_set_submenu (..., NULL). * gtk_default_draw_check() has been fixed to really decrease the indicator size by one pixel to ensure an odd size instead of accidentially increasing it. Consequently, gtk_cell_renderer_toggle_render() could be fixed to not subtract 1 from the size passed to gtk_paint_option(), which was just a workaround for above off-by-two for even sizes (theme engines now get the real indicator size passed). The default toggle size of GtkCheckMenuItem and GtkCellRendererToggle has been changed to 13 to be consistent with GtkCheckButton. The only visible change with default settings is that the indicator in GtkCellRendererToggle has changed its size from 11 to 13 and is now consistent with menus and toggle buttons. * GTK+ has always required that gtk_init() (or a variant thereof) is called before any other GTK+ function. Some applications call functions like gtk_clipboard_get() to check if they need to call gtk_init(), anyway. A change in GLib 2.14 has recently broken this unsupported practise. It is worth pointing out that calling gtk_init() twice does no harm. Release notes for 2.10 ====================== * The hexadecimal Unicode input feature has been reworked. It no longer blocks the use of the sixteen Ctrl-Shift-<hex digit> key sequences. Now it only uses Ctrl-Shift-u. * A memory leak in GtkStyle handling has been fixed. This may expose bugs in third-party widgets which forget to call gtk_style_attach() in their realize functions. * Range widgets like GtkScrollbar now render their arrows insensitive when the slider is at the end. Applications which react to arrow clicks even if the slider is at the end may want to use the new gtk_range_set_[upper/lower]_stepper_sensitivity() functions to prevent the arrows from being rendered insensitive. * GtkObject now uses the "floating reference" support in GObject. GTK_OBJECT_IS_FLOATING() will still work, but direct checking of the GTK_FLOATING flag will no longer detect the floating reference. Details about floating references can be found in the docs: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/gobject-The-Base-Object-Type.html#floating-ref * Accelerators like (_F) are now stripped from labels when they are displayed in toolbars. If this is not wanted, the feature can be suppressed by inserting a Unicode control character, e.g ZWNJ. * The pixbuf theme engine can now customize expanders (in GtkTreeView and GtkExpander) and resize grips, using the new EXPANDER and RESIZE_GRIP function values. * Dialogs created by gtk_about_dialog_new() no longer hide automatically when the user clicks close. It is the applications responsibility to hide or destroy the dialog. * Several new signals have been added to GtkNotebook. Care has been taken to choose signal names which do not collide with signals added by well-known derived classes. The names which can no longer be used for signals in objects derived from GtkNotebook are page-reordered, page-removed and page-added. * Due to the interface changes in the file chooser backend interface, the GTK+ ABI version has been bumped to 2.10.0. Third-party filesystem backends have to be ported to the new interface, other modules, such as theme engines, input method modules or pixbuf loaders have to be rebuilt so that they are installed in the right place for GTK+ to find them. Release notes for 2.8 ===================== * GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 require the cairo library. * The default theme has been renamed to "Raleigh". Existing configurations specifying the "Default" theme name should still work. * The GtkTreeView::enable-search property has been changed to control only typeahead search, not the C-f keybinding to start an interactive search. To turn off interactive searching completely, you have to set GtkTreeView::search-column to -1. * The restriction on using the same cell renderer in multiple columns of a GtkTreeView is now more strictly enforced. * In GTK+ 2.8, GtkCalendar uses nl_langinfo() (if available) to determine the first day of the week. Thus, it is possible to select the first day of the week independently from the language, by setting LC_TIME. * In GTK+ 2.8, the gtk-update-icon-cache utility includes image data in the icon caches, which will make the icon cache files larger than the one produced by GTK+ 2.6. This change will reduce the memory overhead of icon themes at runtime, since all GTK+ applications can share the image data in memory. * In 2.8, GDK emits GdkEventGrabBroken events when a keyboard or pointer grab is broken. On X11, this can happen if the same application grabs again, or if the window used for the grab becomes unviewable. It happens more often on Win32. Applications which use grabs should pay attention to these events and do the necessary cleanups when the grab is lost. * The GIOChannel code for sockets on win32 has been rewritten. Applications who make non-trivial use of GIOChannels on win32 should be watched for possible problems. * GLib 2.8 uses atomic operations to implement reference counting, thus g_object_ref/unref, g_closure_ref/sink/unref and g_iochannel_ref/unref can be used without locking in multithreaded applications. Note that other modifications, like concurrent setting of properties still require locking. * g_convert() and related character set conversion functions have been fixed to emit pending shift states and to not cache iconv descriptors across multiple calls, since that is problematic for some encodings. Note that these functions are not suitable for streaming conversions; use g_iconv() to do streaming conversion. Release notes for 2.6 ===================== * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistency. To make use of this feature, a clipboard manager following the specification at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/clipboard-manager-spec must be running. A sample implementation of such a clipboard manager is available at http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/clipboard-manager-0.3.tar.gz Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_clipboard_persistence() to find out if clipboard persistence is available. * Notification on clipboard ownership changes via GdkOwnerChange events requires the XFIXES X extension. Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_selection_notification() to find out if ownerchip change notification is available. * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environtment variable may be necessary if your icons aren't installed in the default location /usr/share/icons. * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 can make use of mmap()able cache files to avoid a lot of disk searching overhead. GTK+ includes a utility named gtk-update-icon-cache to generate these cache files. For further details, see the gtk-update-icon-cache man page or the GTK+ documentation. * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GTK+, when compiled with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with IA__, may be seen when debugging a GTK+ program. * The following functions have been deprecated in GTK+ 2.6: gdk_pango_context_set_colormap gtk_cell_renderer_editing_canceled * The new GtkFileChooser widget emphasizes simplicity and thus does not provide a navigation entry by default when opening files. Experienced command line users will likely want to make heavy use of the location dialog brought up by the Control-L key shortcut. * The GTK+ libraries use an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning with prefixes such as _gtk, _gdk, and _pango will be exported from the library, on others not. In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that, GTK+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed header files and were never intended to be exported. * The gdk_pixbuf_xlib library included in the contrib/ directory and the framebuffer GDK backend included in the gdk/linux-fb directory of GTK+ are provided on an as-is basis and have not been tested at all. No guarantees about the degree of workingness or about future compatibility are provided. * On Unix, the assumption of GLib and GTK+ by default is that filenames on the filesystem are encoded in UTF-8 rather than the encoding of the locale; the GTK+ developers consider that having filenames whose interpretation depends on the current locale is fundamentally a bad idea. If you have filenames encoded in the encoding of your locale, then you may want to set the G_FILENAME_ENCODING environment variable: G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale export G_FILENAME_ENCODING (Earlier versions of GLib 2.x required a different environment variable setting; G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 to achieve the same effect; this is still supported, but G_FILENAME_ENCODING is preferred.) Best integration of GTK+ 2.6 with the environment is achieved by using a UTF-8 locale. On Windows, filenames passed to GTK+ should always be in UTF-8, as in GLib 2.6. This is different than in previous versions of GTK+ where the system codepage was used. As in GLib, for DLL ABI stability, applications built against previous versions of GTK+ will use entry points providing the old semantics. When compiling against GTK+ 2.6, applications intended to be portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose names have been constructed from strings returned from GTK+ or GLib. How to report bugs ================== Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system. (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product gtk+.) You will need to create an account for yourself. In the bug report please include: * Information about your system. For instance: - What operating system and version - What version of X - For Linux, what version of the C library And anything else you think is relevant. * How to reproduce the bug. If you can reproduce it with one of the tests or demos built with GTK+, such as demos/gtk-demo/gtk-demo, that would be most convenient. Otherwise, please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software that can be downloaded. * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the crash occured. * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error, it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test program with the --sync command line option. Patches ======= Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment to that bug report. Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch, and attach the patch to that bug report. Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -up option to GNU diff.)
