4 This is GTK+ version 2.10.0. GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for
5 creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets,
6 GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off projects to
7 complete application suites.
9 GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the
10 licensing terms for GTK+, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all
11 developers, including those developing proprietary software, without any
12 license fees or royalties.
14 The official ftp site is:
15 ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk
17 The official web site is:
20 Information about mailing lists can be found at
21 http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html
27 See the file 'INSTALL'
30 Release notes for 2.10
31 ======================
33 * The hexadecimal Unicode input feature has been reworked. It no longer
34 blocks the use of the sixteen Ctrl-Shift-<hex digit> key sequences. Now
35 it only uses Ctrl-Shift-u.
37 * A memory leak in GtkStyle handling has been fixed. This may expose bugs
38 in third-party widgets which forget to call gtk_style_attach() in their
41 * Range widgets like GtkScrollbar now render their arrows insensitive
42 when the slider is at the end. Applications which react to arrow
43 clicks even if the slider is at the end may want to use the new
44 gtk_range_set_[upper/lower]_stepper_sensitivity() functions to
45 prevent the arrows from being rendered insensitive.
47 * GtkObject now uses the "floating reference" support in GObject.
48 GTK_OBJECT_IS_FLOATING() will still work, but direct checking
49 of the GTK_FLOATING flag will no longer detect the floating
50 reference. Details about floating references can be found in the docs:
51 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/gobject-The-Base-Object-Type.html#floating-ref
53 * Accelerators like (_F) are now stripped from labels when they are
54 displayed in toolbars. If this is not wanted, the feature can be
55 suppressed by inserting a Unicode control character, e.g ZWNJ.
57 * The pixbuf theme engine can now customize expanders (in GtkTreeView
58 and GtkExpander) and resize grips, using the new EXPANDER and
59 RESIZE_GRIP function values.
61 * Dialogs created by gtk_about_dialog_new() no longer hide automatically
62 when the user clicks close. It is the applications responsibility to
63 hide or destroy the dialog.
65 * Several new signals have been added to GtkNotebook. Care has been taken
66 to choose signal names which do not collide with signals added by well-known
67 derived classes. The names which can no longer be used for signals in
68 objects derived from GtkNotebook are page-reordered, page-removed and
71 * Due to the interface changes in the file chooser backend interface,
72 the GTK+ ABI version has been bumped to 2.10.0. Third-party filesystem
73 backends have to be ported to the new interface, other modules, such as
74 theme engines, input method modules or pixbuf loaders have to be rebuilt
75 so that they are installed in the right place for GTK+ to find them.
81 * GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 require the cairo library.
83 * The default theme has been renamed to "Raleigh". Existing configurations
84 specifying the "Default" theme name should still work.
86 * The GtkTreeView::enable-search property has been changed to control
87 only typeahead search, not the C-f keybinding to start an interactive
88 search. To turn off interactive searching completely, you have to
89 set GtkTreeView::search-column to -1.
91 * The restriction on using the same cell renderer in multiple columns
92 of a GtkTreeView is now more strictly enforced.
94 * In GTK+ 2.8, GtkCalendar uses nl_langinfo() (if available) to determine
95 the first day of the week. Thus, it is possible to select the first day
96 of the week independently from the language, by setting LC_TIME.
98 * In GTK+ 2.8, the gtk-update-icon-cache utility includes image data
99 in the icon caches, which will make the icon cache files larger than
100 the one produced by GTK+ 2.6. This change will reduce the memory
101 overhead of icon themes at runtime, since all GTK+ applications can
102 share the image data in memory.
104 * In 2.8, GDK emits GdkEventGrabBroken events when a keyboard or pointer
105 grab is broken. On X11, this can happen if the same application grabs
106 again, or if the window used for the grab becomes unviewable. It happens
107 more often on Win32. Applications which use grabs should pay attention
108 to these events and do the necessary cleanups when the grab is lost.
109 * The GIOChannel code for sockets on win32 has been rewritten.
110 Applications who make non-trivial use of GIOChannels on win32 should
111 be watched for possible problems.
113 * GLib 2.8 uses atomic operations to implement reference counting, thus
114 g_object_ref/unref, g_closure_ref/sink/unref and g_iochannel_ref/unref
115 can be used without locking in multithreaded applications. Note that
116 other modifications, like concurrent setting of properties still require
119 * g_convert() and related character set conversion functions have been
120 fixed to emit pending shift states and to not cache iconv descriptors
121 across multiple calls, since that is problematic for some encodings.
122 Note that these functions are not suitable for streaming conversions;
123 use g_iconv() to do streaming conversion.
126 Release notes for 2.6
127 =====================
129 * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistency. To make use of this feature,
130 a clipboard manager following the specification at
131 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/clipboard-manager-spec
132 must be running. A sample implementation of such a clipboard manager
134 http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/clipboard-manager-0.3.tar.gz
135 Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_clipboard_persistence()
136 to find out if clipboard persistence is available.
138 * Notification on clipboard ownership changes via GdkOwnerChange events
139 requires the XFIXES X extension. Applications can use the function
140 gdk_display_supports_selection_notification() to find out if ownerchip
141 change notification is available.
143 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme
144 specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environtment variable may be
145 necessary if your icons aren't installed in the default location
148 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 can make use of mmap()able cache files
149 to avoid a lot of disk searching overhead. GTK+ includes a utility named
150 gtk-update-icon-cache to generate these cache files. For further details,
151 see the gtk-update-icon-cache man page or the GTK+ documentation.
153 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GTK+, when compiled
154 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
155 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
156 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GTK+ program.
158 * The following functions have been deprecated in GTK+ 2.6:
159 gdk_pango_context_set_colormap
160 gtk_cell_renderer_editing_canceled
162 * The new GtkFileChooser widget emphasizes simplicity and thus does
163 not provide a navigation entry by default when opening files.
164 Experienced command line users will likely want to make heavy use of
165 the location dialog brought up by the Control-L key shortcut.
167 * The GTK+ libraries use an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
168 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
169 with prefixes such as _gtk, _gdk, and _pango will be exported
170 from the library, on others not. In no case can applications
171 use these private symbols. In addition to that, GTK+ 2.6 makes several
172 symbols private which were not in any installed header files and
173 were never intended to be exported.
175 * The gdk_pixbuf_xlib library included in the contrib/ directory
176 and the framebuffer GDK backend included in the gdk/linux-fb directory
177 of GTK+ are provided on an as-is basis and have not been tested at all.
178 No guarantees about the degree of workingness or about future
179 compatibility are provided.
181 * On Unix, the assumption of GLib and GTK+ by default is that filenames on
182 the filesystem are encoded in UTF-8 rather than the encoding of the locale;
183 the GTK+ developers consider that having filenames whose interpretation
184 depends on the current locale is fundamentally a bad idea.
186 If you have filenames encoded in the encoding of your locale, then you
187 may want to set the G_FILENAME_ENCODING environment variable:
189 G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale
190 export G_FILENAME_ENCODING
192 (Earlier versions of GLib 2.x required a different environment variable
193 setting; G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 to achieve the same effect; this
194 is still supported, but G_FILENAME_ENCODING is preferred.)
195 Best integration of GTK+ 2.6 with the environment is achieved by
196 using a UTF-8 locale.
198 On Windows, filenames passed to GTK+ should always be in UTF-8, as
199 in GLib 2.6. This is different than in previous versions of GTK+
200 where the system codepage was used. As in GLib, for DLL ABI
201 stability, applications built against previous versions of GTK+ will
202 use entry points providing the old semantics.
204 When compiling against GTK+ 2.6, applications intended to be
205 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
206 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
207 names have been constructed from strings returned from GTK+ or GLib.
213 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
214 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product gtk+.) You will need to create an
215 account for yourself.
217 In the bug report please include:
219 * Information about your system. For instance:
221 - What operating system and version
223 - For Linux, what version of the C library
225 And anything else you think is relevant.
227 * How to reproduce the bug.
229 If you can reproduce it with one of the tests or demos built with GTK+,
230 such as demos/gtk-demo/gtk-demo, that would be most convenient. Otherwise,
231 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a
232 last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software
233 that can be downloaded.
235 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the
238 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not
239 necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error,
240 it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test
241 program with the --sync command line option.
247 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the patch
248 fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment to that bug
251 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch, and attach
252 the patch to that bug report.
254 Bug reports containing patches should include the PATCH keyword in their
255 keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GTK+ programming
256 interface, the API keyword should also be included.
258 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU diff.)