4 This is GTK+ version @GTK_VERSION@. 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 2.20
31 ======================
33 * GtkStatusbar now has a message area (see gtk_status_bar_get_message_area)
34 which makes it easy to place additional widgets inside the statusbar
35 frame or to replace the label widgets. Previously, this was only possible
36 by accessing the innards of the statusbar widget directly. Applications
37 which are doing so may need some adjustments, since the addition of the
38 message area changed the internal widget hierarchy.
40 * GDK will now set all matching virtual modifiers in the state field of
41 key events. Depending on your X modifier map, this can lead to more bits
42 in the state field being set than before. If you are manually matching
43 key events against key/modifier combinations you should make sure that
44 you properly mask away irrelevant parts of the state field. The
45 gdk_keymap_map_virtual_modifiers() function can help with matching
46 against virtual modifiers.
48 Release notes for 2.18
49 ======================
51 * gtk_tooltip_set_custom now accept a NULL custom_widget to unset the
52 old custom_widget. Custom_widget does not get destroyed when the
55 * JPEG2000 support is no longer enabled by default. It must be
56 explicitly turned on, by passing --with-libjasper to configure.
58 * GDK has been reworked to implement 'client-side windows'. This offers
59 exciting new possibilities, such as transformed, offscreen rendering,
60 but it breaks some long-standing assumptions that applications may
61 have about GDK windows. Setting the environment variable
62 GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS makes GDK create a native X11 window for each
63 GDK window, which might make problematic applications work better.
65 * GTK+ calls signal (SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN) during initialization, to ignore
66 SIGPIPE signals, since these are almost never wanted in graphical
67 applications. If you do need to handle SIGPIPE for some reason, reset
68 the handler after gtk_init(), but notice that other libraries (e.g.
69 libdbus or gvfs) might do similar things.
71 Release notes for 2.16
72 ======================
74 * Password entries now display a caps-lock warning. This can be turned off
75 with the caps-lock-warning property.
77 * Various orientation-related functions have been deprecated in favour
78 of the new GtkOrientable interface: gtk_scale_button_get_orientation,
79 gtk_scale_button_set_orientation, gtk_toolbar_set_orientation.
81 * The action-proxy interaction has been changed. Widgets that operate as
82 proxies have to implement the GtkActivatable interface now. GtkActivatable
83 implementation are responsible for syncing their appearance with the
84 action and for activating the action. All GTK+ widgets that are commonly
85 used as proxies implement the GtkActivatable interface.
87 * The handling of keyboard shortcuts has been changed, to help with a
88 longstanding complaint about the way GTK+ handles multiple layouts. GTK+
89 now only uses keys from groups other than the current group if they are
90 not present in the current group.
92 Release notes for 2.14
93 ======================
95 * gtkitemfactory.h is now completely deprecated.
96 As gtkactiongroup.h and gtkstock.h no longer include the gtkitemfactory.h
97 header, this might break application using gtk_item_factory_* symbols
98 without including gtkitemfactory.h - even though this behaviour has never
99 been supported in the first place.
101 * The GtkFileSystem semi-private interface has been removed.
102 The GTK+ filechooser implementation now uses GIO directly, which has
103 rendered external filesystem implementations unnecessary. Consequently,
104 the GtkFileSystem interface is no longer available, nor the filechooser
105 will load any GtkFileSystem implementation.
107 * GtkComboBox now renders the popdown button insensitive when
108 the model is empty. Applications which want to populate the list
109 only before displaying it can set gtk_combo_box_set_button_sensitivity
110 to GTK_SENSITIVITY_ON, so that the button is always sensitive or
111 GTK_SENSITIVITY_OFF to make it insensitive respectively.
113 * In the early 2.14.x releases, GtkAdjustment was changed to enforce
114 that values are restricted to the range [lower, upper - page_size].
115 This has always been the documented behaviour, and the recommended
116 practice is to set page_size to 0 when using adjustments for simple
117 scalar values, like in a slider or spin button.
118 Due to the large number of applications that are affected by this
119 change, the behaviour has been reverted to the old behaviour in
120 2.14.3, with an explicit warning that this change will be
121 reintroduced in 2.90.
123 * gdk-pixbuf will use GIO for mime type detection if possible. For
124 this to work, shared-mime-info needs to be installed and XDG_DATA_DIRS
125 set accordingly at configure time. Otherwise, gdk-pixbuf falls
126 back to its built-in sniffing implementation.
128 Release notes for 2.12
129 ======================
131 * gtk_about_dialog_get/set_name() were deprecated in favour of
132 gtk_about_dialog_get/set_program_name(), the GtkAboutDialog now uses the
133 "program-name" property instead of the conflicting "name" property.
135 * The gdk-pixbuf tiff loader now requires libtiff 3.6.0 or later.
137 * Support for Windows 9x/ME has officially been removed. It hasn't worked
140 * The GtkTextBufferTargetInfo enumeration values have been changed from
141 G_MAXUINT-0, G_MAXUINT-1, G_MAXUINT-2, etc, to -1, -2, -3 to stay within
144 * A change in the handling of _NET_WM_USER_TIME properties on toplevel
145 windows can cause deadlock problems with window managers that are using
146 GDK for drawing decorations. In particular, metacity <= 2.18.0 is affected
147 by this. The problem has been fixed in metacity 2.18.1.
149 * Semi-private GtkTextLayout api has changed: new GtkTextLayout method
150 invalidate_cursors(), and new functions gtk_text_layout_invalidate_cursors()
151 and gtk_text_layout_cursors_changed(), which should be used in place of
152 gtk_text_layout_invalidate() and gtk_text_layout_changed() if invalidation
153 is due to marks moved or changed selection; new GtkTextLineDisplay structure
154 member. Source compatibility is preserved; binary compatibility may break
155 only if GtkTextLineDisplay structure was created on stack or as a part
156 of another structure (in particular GnomeCanvas and its clones do not need
159 * Another new signal has been added to GtkNotebook. The new signal
160 is called create-window, so this name can no longer be used for signals
161 in objects derived from GtkNotebook.
163 * The gtk_notebook_set/get_group_id() functions were found to be insufficient
164 and have been deprecated in favour of gtk_notebook_set/get_group().
166 * The move-focus signal has been moved to GtkWidget, to unify the
167 various implementations of this signal in specific widgets. Great care
168 has been taken to make sure that all code using this signal continues
171 * An unused and hardly visible GtkFrame has been removed from the menu
172 widget hierarchy when GtkComboBox::appears-as-list style property is
173 set. Any RC file applying a different style to any widget below the
174 widget path "gtk-combobox-popup-window.GtkFrame" should take into
175 account that the frame no longer exists.
177 * The external print preview application used by GtkPrintOperationPreview
178 is now passed the print settings on the command line with the
179 --print-settings parameter pointing to a temp file containing the
180 settings. The preview application assumes ownership of the file and
181 should delete it once it does not need it anymore. The --print-settings
182 commandline option is understood by Evince 0.9.0 and newer. To use a
183 different print preview application, change the gtk-print-preview-command
184 setting in your gtkrc file, e.g. gtk-print-preview-command = "ggv %f"
186 * GtkMenuShell is now defined as an abstract type. It was already
187 documented as an abstract class, and there is little reason to
190 * The GtkTooltips struct (this is the old tooltips API) is now considered
191 private. Code that used to access this struct, in particular the
192 tips_data_list field, will need to change. All of the old tooltips
193 API has been deprecated in favour of a new implementation and
194 API. This affects all of the gtk_tooltips_ functions, and functions
195 which take a GtkTooltips argument, such as gtk_tool_item_set_tooltip()
196 and gtk_menu_tool_button_set_arrow_tooltip().
198 * The memory management of the GtkRecentManager object has been changed,
199 as using the screen didn't guarantee that the singleton instance was
200 correctly destroyed. The screen-related functions have been deprecated,
201 and should not be used anymore; the GtkRecentManager instance returned by
202 the gtk_recent_manager_get_default() function is guaranteed to be valid
203 for the entire lifetime of an application.
205 * A number of interfaces that have been superseded by newer interfaces for
206 a long time have finally been deprecated. This includes
207 gtk_widget_ref/unref(), gtk_rc_style_ref/unref() and the old file selector.
209 * The various coordinate systems in use in GtkTreeView widgets have
210 been clarified in the documentation, and in the cause of doing so,
211 the functions gtk_tree_view_widget_to_tree_coords() and
212 gtk_tree_view_tree_to_widget_coords() have been deprecated in
213 favour of a new family of gtk_tree_view_convert_ functions.
215 * gtk_menu_item_remove_submenu() has been deprecated in favour of
216 gtk_menu_item_set_submenu (..., NULL).
218 * gtk_default_draw_check() has been fixed to really decrease the
219 indicator size by one pixel to ensure an odd size instead of
220 accidentially increasing it.
221 Consequently, gtk_cell_renderer_toggle_render() could be fixed to
222 not subtract 1 from the size passed to gtk_paint_option(), which
223 was just a workaround for above off-by-two for even sizes (theme
224 engines now get the real indicator size passed).
225 The default toggle size of GtkCheckMenuItem and GtkCellRendererToggle
226 has been changed to 13 to be consistent with GtkCheckButton.
227 The only visible change with default settings is that the indicator in
228 GtkCellRendererToggle has changed its size from 11 to 13 and is now
229 consistent with menus and toggle buttons.
231 * GTK+ has always required that gtk_init() (or a variant thereof) is
232 called before any other GTK+ function. Some applications call functions
233 like gtk_clipboard_get() to check if they need to call gtk_init(),
234 anyway. A change in GLib 2.14 has recently broken this unsupported
235 practise. It is worth pointing out that calling gtk_init() twice
239 Release notes for 2.10
240 ======================
242 * The hexadecimal Unicode input feature has been reworked. It no longer
243 blocks the use of the sixteen Ctrl-Shift-<hex digit> key sequences. Now
244 it only uses Ctrl-Shift-u.
246 * A memory leak in GtkStyle handling has been fixed. This may expose bugs
247 in third-party widgets which forget to call gtk_style_attach() in their
250 * Range widgets like GtkScrollbar now render their arrows insensitive
251 when the slider is at the end. Applications which react to arrow
252 clicks even if the slider is at the end may want to use the new
253 gtk_range_set_[upper/lower]_stepper_sensitivity() functions to
254 prevent the arrows from being rendered insensitive.
256 * GtkObject now uses the "floating reference" support in GObject.
257 GTK_OBJECT_IS_FLOATING() will still work, but direct checking
258 of the GTK_FLOATING flag will no longer detect the floating
259 reference. Details about floating references can be found in the docs:
260 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/gobject-The-Base-Object-Type.html#floating-ref
262 * Accelerators like (_F) are now stripped from labels when they are
263 displayed in toolbars. If this is not wanted, the feature can be
264 suppressed by inserting a Unicode control character, e.g ZWNJ.
266 * The pixbuf theme engine can now customize expanders (in GtkTreeView
267 and GtkExpander) and resize grips, using the new EXPANDER and
268 RESIZE_GRIP function values.
270 * Dialogs created by gtk_about_dialog_new() no longer hide automatically
271 when the user clicks close. It is the applications responsibility to
272 hide or destroy the dialog.
274 * Several new signals have been added to GtkNotebook. Care has been taken
275 to choose signal names which do not collide with signals added by well-known
276 derived classes. The names which can no longer be used for signals in
277 objects derived from GtkNotebook are page-reordered, page-removed and
280 * Due to the interface changes in the file chooser backend interface,
281 the GTK+ ABI version has been bumped to 2.10.0. Third-party filesystem
282 backends have to be ported to the new interface, other modules, such as
283 theme engines, input method modules or pixbuf loaders have to be rebuilt
284 so that they are installed in the right place for GTK+ to find them.
287 Release notes for 2.8
288 =====================
290 * GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 require the cairo library.
292 * The default theme has been renamed to "Raleigh". Existing configurations
293 specifying the "Default" theme name should still work.
295 * The GtkTreeView::enable-search property has been changed to control
296 only typeahead search, not the C-f keybinding to start an interactive
297 search. To turn off interactive searching completely, you have to
298 set GtkTreeView::search-column to -1.
300 * The restriction on using the same cell renderer in multiple columns
301 of a GtkTreeView is now more strictly enforced.
303 * In GTK+ 2.8, GtkCalendar uses nl_langinfo() (if available) to determine
304 the first day of the week. Thus, it is possible to select the first day
305 of the week independently from the language, by setting LC_TIME.
307 * In GTK+ 2.8, the gtk-update-icon-cache utility includes image data
308 in the icon caches, which will make the icon cache files larger than
309 the one produced by GTK+ 2.6. This change will reduce the memory
310 overhead of icon themes at runtime, since all GTK+ applications can
311 share the image data in memory.
313 * In 2.8, GDK emits GdkEventGrabBroken events when a keyboard or pointer
314 grab is broken. On X11, this can happen if the same application grabs
315 again, or if the window used for the grab becomes unviewable. It happens
316 more often on Win32. Applications which use grabs should pay attention
317 to these events and do the necessary cleanups when the grab is lost.
318 * The GIOChannel code for sockets on win32 has been rewritten.
319 Applications who make non-trivial use of GIOChannels on win32 should
320 be watched for possible problems.
322 * GLib 2.8 uses atomic operations to implement reference counting, thus
323 g_object_ref/unref, g_closure_ref/sink/unref and g_iochannel_ref/unref
324 can be used without locking in multithreaded applications. Note that
325 other modifications, like concurrent setting of properties still require
328 * g_convert() and related character set conversion functions have been
329 fixed to emit pending shift states and to not cache iconv descriptors
330 across multiple calls, since that is problematic for some encodings.
331 Note that these functions are not suitable for streaming conversions;
332 use g_iconv() to do streaming conversion.
335 Release notes for 2.6
336 =====================
338 * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistency. To make use of this feature,
339 a clipboard manager following the specification at
340 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/clipboard-manager-spec
341 must be running. A sample implementation of such a clipboard manager
343 http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/clipboard-manager-0.3.tar.gz
344 Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_clipboard_persistence()
345 to find out if clipboard persistence is available.
347 * Notification on clipboard ownership changes via GdkOwnerChange events
348 requires the XFIXES X extension. Applications can use the function
349 gdk_display_supports_selection_notification() to find out if ownerchip
350 change notification is available.
352 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme
353 specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environtment variable may be
354 necessary if your icons aren't installed in the default location
357 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 can make use of mmap()able cache files
358 to avoid a lot of disk searching overhead. GTK+ includes a utility named
359 gtk-update-icon-cache to generate these cache files. For further details,
360 see the gtk-update-icon-cache man page or the GTK+ documentation.
362 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GTK+, when compiled
363 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
364 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
365 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GTK+ program.
367 * The following functions have been deprecated in GTK+ 2.6:
368 gdk_pango_context_set_colormap
369 gtk_cell_renderer_editing_canceled
371 * The new GtkFileChooser widget emphasizes simplicity and thus does
372 not provide a navigation entry by default when opening files.
373 Experienced command line users will likely want to make heavy use of
374 the location dialog brought up by the Control-L key shortcut.
376 * The GTK+ libraries use an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
377 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
378 with prefixes such as _gtk, _gdk, and _pango will be exported
379 from the library, on others not. In no case can applications
380 use these private symbols. In addition to that, GTK+ 2.6 makes several
381 symbols private which were not in any installed header files and
382 were never intended to be exported.
384 * The gdk_pixbuf_xlib library included in the contrib/ directory
385 and the framebuffer GDK backend included in the gdk/linux-fb directory
386 of GTK+ are provided on an as-is basis and have not been tested at all.
387 No guarantees about the degree of workingness or about future
388 compatibility are provided.
390 * On Unix, the assumption of GLib and GTK+ by default is that filenames on
391 the filesystem are encoded in UTF-8 rather than the encoding of the locale;
392 the GTK+ developers consider that having filenames whose interpretation
393 depends on the current locale is fundamentally a bad idea.
395 If you have filenames encoded in the encoding of your locale, then you
396 may want to set the G_FILENAME_ENCODING environment variable:
398 G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale
399 export G_FILENAME_ENCODING
401 (Earlier versions of GLib 2.x required a different environment variable
402 setting; G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 to achieve the same effect; this
403 is still supported, but G_FILENAME_ENCODING is preferred.)
404 Best integration of GTK+ 2.6 with the environment is achieved by
405 using a UTF-8 locale.
407 On Windows, filenames passed to GTK+ should always be in UTF-8, as
408 in GLib 2.6. This is different than in previous versions of GTK+
409 where the system codepage was used. As in GLib, for DLL ABI
410 stability, applications built against previous versions of GTK+ will
411 use entry points providing the old semantics.
413 When compiling against GTK+ 2.6, applications intended to be
414 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
415 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
416 names have been constructed from strings returned from GTK+ or GLib.
422 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
423 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product gtk+.) You will need to create an
424 account for yourself.
426 In the bug report please include:
428 * Information about your system. For instance:
430 - What operating system and version
432 - For Linux, what version of the C library
434 And anything else you think is relevant.
436 * How to reproduce the bug.
438 If you can reproduce it with one of the tests or demos built with GTK+,
439 such as demos/gtk-demo/gtk-demo, that would be most convenient. Otherwise,
440 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a
441 last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software
442 that can be downloaded.
444 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the
447 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not
448 necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error,
449 it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test
450 program with the --sync command line option.
456 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the patch
457 fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment to that bug
460 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch, and attach
461 the patch to that bug report.
463 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -up option to GNU diff.)