4 This is GTK+ version 2.12.1. 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 2.12
31 ======================
33 * gtk_about_dialog_get/set_name() were deprecated in favour of
34 gtk_about_dialog_get/set_program_name(), the GtkAboutDialog now uses the
35 "program-name" property instead of the conflicting "name" property.
37 * The gdk-pixbuf tiff loader now requires libtiff 3.6.0 or later.
39 * Support for Windows 9x/ME has officially been removed. It hasn't worked
42 * The GtkTextBufferTargetInfo enumeration values have been changed from
43 G_MAXUINT-0, G_MAXUINT-1, G_MAXUINT-2, etc, to -1, -2, -3 to stay within
46 * A change in the handling of _NET_WM_USER_TIME properties on toplevel
47 windows can cause deadlock problems with window managers that are using
48 GDK for drawing decorations. In particular, metacity <= 2.18.0 is affected
49 by this. The problem has been fixed in metacity 2.18.1.
51 * Semi-private GtkTextLayout api has changed: new GtkTextLayout method
52 invalidate_cursors(), and new functions gtk_text_layout_invalidate_cursors()
53 and gtk_text_layout_cursors_changed(), which should be used in place of
54 gtk_text_layout_invalidate() and gtk_text_layout_changed() if invalidation
55 is due to marks moved or changed selection; new GtkTextLineDisplay structure
56 member. Source compatibility is preserved; binary compatibility may break
57 only if GtkTextLineDisplay structure was created on stack or as a part
58 of another structure (in particular GnomeCanvas and its clones do not need
61 * Another new signal has been added to GtkNotebook. The new signal
62 is called create-window, so this name can no longer be used for signals
63 in objects derived from GtkNotebook.
65 * The gtk_notebook_set/get_group_id() functions were found to be insufficient
66 and have been deprecated in favour of gtk_notebook_set/get_group().
68 * The move-focus signal has been moved to GtkWidget, to unify the
69 various implementations of this signal in specific widgets. Great care
70 has been taken to make sure that all code using this signal continues
73 * An unused and hardly visible GtkFrame has been removed from the menu
74 widget hierarchy when GtkComboBox::appears-as-list style property is
75 set. Any RC file applying a different style to any widget below the
76 widget path "gtk-combobox-popup-window.GtkFrame" should take into
77 account that the frame no longer exists.
79 * The external print preview application used by GtkPrintOperationPreview
80 is now passed the print settings on the command line with the
81 --print-settings parameter pointing to a temp file containing the
82 settings. The preview application assumes ownership of the file and
83 should delete it once it does not need it anymore. The --print-settings
84 commandline option is understood by Evince 0.9.0 and newer. To use a
85 different print preview application, change the gtk-print-preview-command
86 setting in your gtkrc file, e.g. gtk-print-preview-command = "ggv %f"
88 * GtkMenuShell is now defined as an abstract type. It was already
89 documented as an abstract class, and there is little reason to
92 * The GtkTooltips struct (this is the old tooltips API) is now considered
93 private. Code that used to access this struct, in particular the
94 tips_data_list field, will need to change. All of the old tooltips
95 API has been deprecated in favour of a new implementation and
96 API. This affects all of the gtk_tooltips_ functions, and functions
97 which take a GtkTooltips argument, such as gtk_tool_item_set_tooltip()
98 and gtk_menu_tool_button_set_arrow_tooltip().
100 * The memory management of the GtkRecentManager object has been changed,
101 as using the screen didn't guarantee that the singleton instance was
102 correctly destroyed. The screen-related functions have been deprecated,
103 and should not be used anymore; the GtkRecentManager instance returned by
104 the gtk_recent_manager_get_default() function is guaranteed to be valid
105 for the entire lifetime of an application.
107 * A number of interfaces that have been superseded by newer interfaces for
108 a long time have finally been deprecated. This includes
109 gtk_widget_ref/unref(), gtk_rc_style_ref/unref() and the old file selector.
111 * The various coordinate systems in use in GtkTreeView widgets have
112 been clarified in the documentation, and in the cause of doing so,
113 the functions gtk_tree_view_widget_to_tree_coords() and
114 gtk_tree_view_tree_to_widget_coords() have been deprecated in
115 favour of a new family of gtk_tree_view_convert_ functions.
117 * gtk_menu_item_remove_submenu() has been deprecated in favour of
118 gtk_menu_item_set_submenu (..., NULL).
120 * gtk_default_draw_check() has been fixed to really decrease the
121 indicator size by one pixel to ensure an odd size instead of
122 accidentially increasing it.
123 Consequently, gtk_cell_renderer_toggle_render() could be fixed to
124 not subtract 1 from the size passed to gtk_paint_option(), which
125 was just a workaround for above off-by-two for even sizes (theme
126 engines now get the real indicator size passed).
127 The default toggle size of GtkCheckMenuItem and GtkCellRendererToggle
128 has been changed to 13 to be consistent with GtkCheckButton.
129 The only visible change with default settings is that the indicator in
130 GtkCellRendererToggle has changed its size from 11 to 13 and is now
131 consistent with menus and toggle buttons.
133 * GTK+ has always required that gtk_init() (or a variant thereof) is
134 called before any other GTK+ function. Some applications call functions
135 like gtk_clipboard_get() to check if they need to call gtk_init(),
136 anyway. A change in GLib 2.14 has recently broken this unsupported
137 practise. It is worth pointing out that calling gtk_init() twice
141 Release notes for 2.10
142 ======================
144 * The hexadecimal Unicode input feature has been reworked. It no longer
145 blocks the use of the sixteen Ctrl-Shift-<hex digit> key sequences. Now
146 it only uses Ctrl-Shift-u.
148 * A memory leak in GtkStyle handling has been fixed. This may expose bugs
149 in third-party widgets which forget to call gtk_style_attach() in their
152 * Range widgets like GtkScrollbar now render their arrows insensitive
153 when the slider is at the end. Applications which react to arrow
154 clicks even if the slider is at the end may want to use the new
155 gtk_range_set_[upper/lower]_stepper_sensitivity() functions to
156 prevent the arrows from being rendered insensitive.
158 * GtkObject now uses the "floating reference" support in GObject.
159 GTK_OBJECT_IS_FLOATING() will still work, but direct checking
160 of the GTK_FLOATING flag will no longer detect the floating
161 reference. Details about floating references can be found in the docs:
162 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/gobject-The-Base-Object-Type.html#floating-ref
164 * Accelerators like (_F) are now stripped from labels when they are
165 displayed in toolbars. If this is not wanted, the feature can be
166 suppressed by inserting a Unicode control character, e.g ZWNJ.
168 * The pixbuf theme engine can now customize expanders (in GtkTreeView
169 and GtkExpander) and resize grips, using the new EXPANDER and
170 RESIZE_GRIP function values.
172 * Dialogs created by gtk_about_dialog_new() no longer hide automatically
173 when the user clicks close. It is the applications responsibility to
174 hide or destroy the dialog.
176 * Several new signals have been added to GtkNotebook. Care has been taken
177 to choose signal names which do not collide with signals added by well-known
178 derived classes. The names which can no longer be used for signals in
179 objects derived from GtkNotebook are page-reordered, page-removed and
182 * Due to the interface changes in the file chooser backend interface,
183 the GTK+ ABI version has been bumped to 2.10.0. Third-party filesystem
184 backends have to be ported to the new interface, other modules, such as
185 theme engines, input method modules or pixbuf loaders have to be rebuilt
186 so that they are installed in the right place for GTK+ to find them.
189 Release notes for 2.8
190 =====================
192 * GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 require the cairo library.
194 * The default theme has been renamed to "Raleigh". Existing configurations
195 specifying the "Default" theme name should still work.
197 * The GtkTreeView::enable-search property has been changed to control
198 only typeahead search, not the C-f keybinding to start an interactive
199 search. To turn off interactive searching completely, you have to
200 set GtkTreeView::search-column to -1.
202 * The restriction on using the same cell renderer in multiple columns
203 of a GtkTreeView is now more strictly enforced.
205 * In GTK+ 2.8, GtkCalendar uses nl_langinfo() (if available) to determine
206 the first day of the week. Thus, it is possible to select the first day
207 of the week independently from the language, by setting LC_TIME.
209 * In GTK+ 2.8, the gtk-update-icon-cache utility includes image data
210 in the icon caches, which will make the icon cache files larger than
211 the one produced by GTK+ 2.6. This change will reduce the memory
212 overhead of icon themes at runtime, since all GTK+ applications can
213 share the image data in memory.
215 * In 2.8, GDK emits GdkEventGrabBroken events when a keyboard or pointer
216 grab is broken. On X11, this can happen if the same application grabs
217 again, or if the window used for the grab becomes unviewable. It happens
218 more often on Win32. Applications which use grabs should pay attention
219 to these events and do the necessary cleanups when the grab is lost.
220 * The GIOChannel code for sockets on win32 has been rewritten.
221 Applications who make non-trivial use of GIOChannels on win32 should
222 be watched for possible problems.
224 * GLib 2.8 uses atomic operations to implement reference counting, thus
225 g_object_ref/unref, g_closure_ref/sink/unref and g_iochannel_ref/unref
226 can be used without locking in multithreaded applications. Note that
227 other modifications, like concurrent setting of properties still require
230 * g_convert() and related character set conversion functions have been
231 fixed to emit pending shift states and to not cache iconv descriptors
232 across multiple calls, since that is problematic for some encodings.
233 Note that these functions are not suitable for streaming conversions;
234 use g_iconv() to do streaming conversion.
237 Release notes for 2.6
238 =====================
240 * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistency. To make use of this feature,
241 a clipboard manager following the specification at
242 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/clipboard-manager-spec
243 must be running. A sample implementation of such a clipboard manager
245 http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/clipboard-manager-0.3.tar.gz
246 Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_clipboard_persistence()
247 to find out if clipboard persistence is available.
249 * Notification on clipboard ownership changes via GdkOwnerChange events
250 requires the XFIXES X extension. Applications can use the function
251 gdk_display_supports_selection_notification() to find out if ownerchip
252 change notification is available.
254 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme
255 specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environtment variable may be
256 necessary if your icons aren't installed in the default location
259 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 can make use of mmap()able cache files
260 to avoid a lot of disk searching overhead. GTK+ includes a utility named
261 gtk-update-icon-cache to generate these cache files. For further details,
262 see the gtk-update-icon-cache man page or the GTK+ documentation.
264 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GTK+, when compiled
265 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
266 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
267 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GTK+ program.
269 * The following functions have been deprecated in GTK+ 2.6:
270 gdk_pango_context_set_colormap
271 gtk_cell_renderer_editing_canceled
273 * The new GtkFileChooser widget emphasizes simplicity and thus does
274 not provide a navigation entry by default when opening files.
275 Experienced command line users will likely want to make heavy use of
276 the location dialog brought up by the Control-L key shortcut.
278 * The GTK+ libraries use an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
279 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
280 with prefixes such as _gtk, _gdk, and _pango will be exported
281 from the library, on others not. In no case can applications
282 use these private symbols. In addition to that, GTK+ 2.6 makes several
283 symbols private which were not in any installed header files and
284 were never intended to be exported.
286 * The gdk_pixbuf_xlib library included in the contrib/ directory
287 and the framebuffer GDK backend included in the gdk/linux-fb directory
288 of GTK+ are provided on an as-is basis and have not been tested at all.
289 No guarantees about the degree of workingness or about future
290 compatibility are provided.
292 * On Unix, the assumption of GLib and GTK+ by default is that filenames on
293 the filesystem are encoded in UTF-8 rather than the encoding of the locale;
294 the GTK+ developers consider that having filenames whose interpretation
295 depends on the current locale is fundamentally a bad idea.
297 If you have filenames encoded in the encoding of your locale, then you
298 may want to set the G_FILENAME_ENCODING environment variable:
300 G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale
301 export G_FILENAME_ENCODING
303 (Earlier versions of GLib 2.x required a different environment variable
304 setting; G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 to achieve the same effect; this
305 is still supported, but G_FILENAME_ENCODING is preferred.)
306 Best integration of GTK+ 2.6 with the environment is achieved by
307 using a UTF-8 locale.
309 On Windows, filenames passed to GTK+ should always be in UTF-8, as
310 in GLib 2.6. This is different than in previous versions of GTK+
311 where the system codepage was used. As in GLib, for DLL ABI
312 stability, applications built against previous versions of GTK+ will
313 use entry points providing the old semantics.
315 When compiling against GTK+ 2.6, applications intended to be
316 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
317 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
318 names have been constructed from strings returned from GTK+ or GLib.
324 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
325 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product gtk+.) You will need to create an
326 account for yourself.
328 In the bug report please include:
330 * Information about your system. For instance:
332 - What operating system and version
334 - For Linux, what version of the C library
336 And anything else you think is relevant.
338 * How to reproduce the bug.
340 If you can reproduce it with one of the tests or demos built with GTK+,
341 such as demos/gtk-demo/gtk-demo, that would be most convenient. Otherwise,
342 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a
343 last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software
344 that can be downloaded.
346 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the
349 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not
350 necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error,
351 it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test
352 program with the --sync command line option.
358 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the patch
359 fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment to that bug
362 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch, and attach
363 the patch to that bug report.
365 Bug reports containing patches should include the PATCH keyword in their
366 keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GTK+ programming
367 interface, the API keyword should also be included.
369 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU diff.)