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GTK+ 2.0

Posted by michael on from the purty-pictures dept.

Some random reader sent in: "Gtk.org all of a sudden (?) says version 2.0 is available. There is a FAQ for 2.0. Here is a mail from the gtk-devel-list with some 'pre-release release-notes' :)."

29 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Wow.. by Warped-Reality · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I tried the devel branch for 2.0 not too long ago, it turned out to be hideously unstable... have they really fixed all of those bugs in such a short period of time?

    --
    This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
    1. Re:Wow.. by chabotc · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actualy, yes a amazing amount of bugs have been fixed in the last months and weeks. Ofcource it is worth keeping in mind this is a .0 release. So all critical bugs should've been found and fixed, but there's bound to be a slew of little ones left.

      More exiting though, is the fact that they can now begin on the next gtk release, which amongst other things will include a new file selector (open / save, etc) dialog ! This is something that a _lot_ of users are hoping and waiting for.

      (check http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2002 -March/msg00179.html for notes on the file selector.

    2. Re:Wow.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Man have attitudes changed. I remember the days when we worked on projects ".0" releases meant "we fixed everything we could." These days ".0" releases mean "We put it out, now let's find the bugs"

    3. Re:Wow.. by tal197 · · Score: 2
      I agree with that entirely. On Solaris GTK-1.3.15 is pretty much unusable, segfaulting all over the place.

      I'm on a bit of a downer though, having spent *ages* building GTK-1.3 and the GNOME-2 beta and finding roughly every other operation I try causes a crash. :-(

      Is that GNOME or Gtk, though? The GNOME stuff is only beta...

      What happens if you run the gtk-demo program supplied with Gtk? I've been tracking the development versions for quite a while (not on Solaris, though) and I've found it pretty stable.

    4. Re:Wow.. by GooberToo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ...have they really fixed all of those bugs in such a short period of time?

      Based on their previous track record for older versions of GTK+, it will be another year or two before the code base stabalizes. And if you report a bug to them, they'll probably tell you to fix it your self or wait for the 3.x series.

    5. Re:Wow.. by tal197 · · Score: 2
      I can tell you from past experience that using GTK+ can be somewhat painful. They tend to not demo portions of code which highlight bugs.

      Yes, but I've been updating ROX-Filer to work with the Gtk+-1.3.x series since 1.3.6, so it has had real-world testing (from many other people's programs, too).

      The current CVS snapshots should work with Gtk+-2.0 if you want some 'proper' testing (although obviously this is the CVS copy, so usual disclaimers apply).

      Of course, they didn't fix all the bugs for 2.0, as they're desparate to get GNOME-2 out, but I haven't seen any major problems in Gtk+-2.0 yet, or in the release candidate.

    6. Re:Wow.. by spudnic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The main three things that annoy me about many open/save dialogs that I encounter are the inability to create new directories, no tab (or some other) completion, and the inconsistancies between them. Sure, let all the folks create their own systems, but at least create a common API at some level so that if I'm using a KDE app in Gnome I get the standard Gnome open save dialogs.

      It really shouldn't be that hard, especially for something as simple as this.

      Now don't even get me started on clipboards... ;)

      --
      load "linux",8,1
    7. Re:Wow.. by Havoc+Pennington · · Score: 2

      Well actually at least half the GTK bugs are found when users report them to bugzilla. I'm sure you did that right?

      If you don't think the demos coincide with how one would actually use GTK, maybe you aren't using GTK as intended...

    8. Re:Wow.. by Havoc+Pennington · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Some quick bugzilla.gnome.org queries would demonstrate with hard evidence that you are
      incorrect, if anyone were interested in reality.
      Wait, this is Slashdot. ;-)

      (Apparently I'm in an answer-the-trolls mood...)

    9. Re:Wow.. by GooberToo · · Score: 2

      hehe

      Reality is exactly as I put it. They had bugs in their linked list implementations for a VERY long time. When I contacted the developers about this, they told me they knew about it and that it had already been fixed in the current development tree. I asked about a patch for the current "stable" (which had lots of other causes for it to crash too). I was told to fix it my self or wait until they got around to it. Furthermore, they said they probably wouldn't get around to it because the next major release was out "ANY TIME NOW". Wow, two years later, here it is. The bug that they knew was there for over 4 months since I reported it, was finally fixed a total of 8 months after it was known to exist.

      Take your queries and come back to planet earth were reality and experince matters.

  2. Excellent! But... by Emil+Brink · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application (plug, plug), I see this is very good news, of course. But whoa, it's going to be a lot of work porting over... Using the deprecated widgets is an impossibility for any self-respecting maintainer, imo. ;^) Also, I sure do hope they managed to get the speed up a bit from the 1.3.x series... That was really underwhelming. Which was sad, since 1.2.x is very snappy.

    --
    main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
    1. Re:Excellent! But... by cyborch · · Score: 2, Informative

      here is a nice list of changes from version 1.2 to 2.0.

    2. Re:Excellent! But... by JanneM · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've found that a lot of the slowness of gtk+2 that I saw was due to the use of AA. Turns out xft isn't the snappiest piece of code around when it's antialiasing. Turn off AA, and things are a lot smoother again.

      /Janne

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
    3. Re:Excellent! But... by Emil+Brink · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, now I've downloaded all the four libs and actually stresed my machine through building and installing it. The classic testgtk application that serves as a rather comprehensive demo of the various capabilities program is still around. And it's not anti-aliased on my machine (no xft, as far as I know), so even if turning that off helps, I'm still not happy. It's really annoying, since there's not that much visible improvement, although I'm sure everything is nice and new under the hood.

      While typing this up, I had this brilliant idea: there are these things known as "benchmarks" which replace vague bitching with hard numbers... Aha!

      I dove into the testgtk.c source, for both this new 2.0.0 release, and the last stable release, 1.2.10. In the "clist" demo (which is very interesting to me, since my app (mentioned in the thread root) uses GtkCList heavily), I added simple instrumentation to measure the time to add 1,000 rows with pixmaps. The results, based on running the code 10 times, dropping the min and max, and averaging the remaining 8 values:

      • GTK+ 1.2.10: 0.081 s
      • GTK+ 2.0.0: 0.787 s
      Difference: a factor of 9.6 slower. Ouch. Oh, and please note that these times are for the "core" loop of the test case, which is enclosed in calls to gtk_clist_freeze() and gtk_clist_thaw(), meaning (afaik) that this does not include the time it takes for GTK+ to actually render the list. It's the internal bookkeeping only. Can you say "dramatically slower"? I know I can.

      The annoying thing with this 10X performance loss is that my next machine isn't all that likely to be 10X faster than my current one; it's simply too large a step. Bummer.

      There, I think I've ranted enough on the topic for this moment. Thanks for listening. :^)

      --
      main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
  3. Real (draft) release notes by tal197 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The linked message only talks about proposed changes to the draft release notes... here are the release notes themselves (also draft):

    Draft release notes for Gtk

  4. New font system by tal197 · · Score: 5, Informative
    One of the main new features is the completely new font system:
    • Everything is in UTF-8 (so no more charset headaches :-)
    • AA fonts using XRENDER (do GDK_USE_XFT=1; export GDK_USE_XFT in your .xsession to enable them).
    • Sane font-chooser dialog, where you just select the font name, weight and size, instead of the previous multi-paned mess.
    • Lots of routines for laying out paragraphs, positioning text cursors, etc, for people doing their own text layout.

    On the negative side, the new font system seems much slower than before. Also it's completely incompatible with Gtk+-1.2, so anyone working with fonts has a massive updating task ahead.

    One cool new feature is that the default font is stored on the display, using the new XSettings system. This means that when you run a program on a remote machine, or as another user, etc, you don't lose your settings.

  5. GTK 'plus' by Ed+Avis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    With the version number jump, you'd think they would have taken the opportunity to rename it from GTK+ back to GTK, which is what everyone calls it anyway.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    1. Re:GTK 'plus' by Adnans · · Score: 2

      Yes and also chang the meaning of the G from 'GIMP' to 'GNU' or something else (Gawd-why-not-do-it-with-a-real-object-oriented-la nguage comes to mind :)

      --
      "In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
    2. Re:GTK 'plus' by scorcherer · · Score: 2
      It's more fun to say GTK = GIMP ToolKit where GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program where GNU = GNU's Not Unix where GNU = ...

      Personally I think in the spirit of Grecursive Gnucronyms it should be named the GTK ToolKit.

      I agree on the OO bit though. It's silly that there are projects like gtkmm around just to compensate for the stupid decision of writing OO in a procedural language. It's like bolting a networking, windowing OS on top of DOS.. wait, someone actually did that...

      --

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    3. Re:GTK 'plus' by Cryptnotic · · Score: 2

      The reason they did it in C was so that all the functions could be used from C programs and so that bindings could be made for every other language out there, including "object oriented" languages like Ruby, Objective C, Java, OCaml, Perl 5-6, etc.

      Only an insane person would actually try to write an ordinary program that uses GTK in C (unless they're using GladeXML).

      Cryptnotic

      --
      My other first post is car post.
  6. What about the Win32 port ? by Khalid · · Score: 2

    They seem to imply that GTK application execute on X Windows, Frame buffer, and Windows ! the former Win32 port was not integrated in the main release ! does it mean now that with just a recompile I can get my GTK applications running in Windows 9x or XP ?

    1. Re:What about the Win32 port ? by Havoc+Pennington · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes, that's correct. The win32 version is not yet
      released though, it's just in "preview" status. Should be out in a few months.

  7. Re:Bonus: refer to previous article for compilatio by irony+nazi · · Score: 2
    Ugh...

    Sorry forged, that would not be irony. That would be a coincidence (and a minor one, at that). Take it from the irony nazi.

    --

    Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
  8. Re:Next Style Scrolling... by Greg+Merchan · · Score: 2

    Put this in your theme:

    GtkScrollbar::has_backward_stepper=0
    GtkScrollbar::has_secondary_forward_stepper=0
    GtkScrollbar::has_secondary_backward_stepper=1
    GtkScrollbar::has_forward_stepper=1

    (Exactly where you put it depends on your theme.)

  9. Re:replace by NotoriousQ · · Score: 2, Informative

    By your comment, it seems that you mean that you have a larger win partition:

    try adding this to your fstab:
    /dev/hda1 /win32 vfat defaults 1 0
    do not forget to change the first argument to the harddrive where your fat partition is, and the second to your chosen mount point (can be anything as long as it is a real existing directory)

    after that, just issue mount /win32 or whatever your mount point is

    As for the replacing GTK -- no no no no. These gtk's are not truly compatible, and thus you will need both libraries. do not worry as the default install should just put them together. I also would not be surprised if you have GTK 1.0 and 1.2 on your hard drive also, so do not replace, and if you are using rpms, you would not even be able to.

    Enjoy

    --
    badness 10000
  10. In Related News... by suwalski · · Score: 4, Informative

    news.gnome.org is reporting that Gnome Beta 2 ("I bastun bor vi allihopa!") is out!

    1. Re:In Related News... by jonathan_ingram · · Score: 2

      Just remember - there is *no* Swedish conspiracy. Wink.

      --
      -- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
  11. Translation by scorcherer · · Score: 2

    "I bastun bor vi allihopa" is Swedish for "We all live in the sauna." Don't ask me what they really mean by that...

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    1. Re:Translation by scorcherer · · Score: 2

      :-) Well that's not a bad way of looking at it. In the end we're all together on this planet, knowing that emacs is better than vi.

      --

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