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 * GtkBuilder no longer sets the "name" property of widgets to the ID
41 attribute of the <object>. Use gtk_buildable_get_name() instead of
42 gtk_widget_get_name() to obtain the ID.
44 * GTK+ now includes introspection data, as a consequence, it gained a
45 dependency on gobject-introspection. It is possible to build without
46 introspection by passing --disable-introspection to configure.
49 Release notes for 2.18
50 ======================
52 * gtk_tooltip_set_custom now accept a NULL custom_widget to unset the
53 old custom_widget. Custom_widget does not get destroyed when the
56 * JPEG2000 support is no longer enabled by default. It must be
57 explicitly turned on, by passing --with-libjasper to configure.
59 * GDK has been reworked to implement 'client-side windows'. This offers
60 exciting new possibilities, such as transformed, offscreen rendering,
61 but it breaks some long-standing assumptions that applications may
62 have about GDK windows. Setting the environment variable
63 GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS makes GDK create a native X11 window for each
64 GDK window, which might make problematic applications work better.
66 * GTK+ calls signal (SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN) during initialization, to ignore
67 SIGPIPE signals, since these are almost never wanted in graphical
68 applications. If you do need to handle SIGPIPE for some reason, reset
69 the handler after gtk_init(), but notice that other libraries (e.g.
70 libdbus or gvfs) might do similar things.
72 Release notes for 2.16
73 ======================
75 * Password entries now display a caps-lock warning. This can be turned off
76 with the caps-lock-warning property.
78 * Various orientation-related functions have been deprecated in favour
79 of the new GtkOrientable interface: gtk_scale_button_get_orientation,
80 gtk_scale_button_set_orientation, gtk_toolbar_set_orientation.
82 * The action-proxy interaction has been changed. Widgets that operate as
83 proxies have to implement the GtkActivatable interface now. GtkActivatable
84 implementation are responsible for syncing their appearance with the
85 action and for activating the action. All GTK+ widgets that are commonly
86 used as proxies implement the GtkActivatable interface.
88 * The handling of keyboard shortcuts has been changed, to help with a
89 longstanding complaint about the way GTK+ handles multiple layouts. GTK+
90 now only uses keys from groups other than the current group if they are
91 not present in the current group.
93 Release notes for 2.14
94 ======================
96 * gtkitemfactory.h is now completely deprecated.
97 As gtkactiongroup.h and gtkstock.h no longer include the gtkitemfactory.h
98 header, this might break application using gtk_item_factory_* symbols
99 without including gtkitemfactory.h - even though this behaviour has never
100 been supported in the first place.
102 * The GtkFileSystem semi-private interface has been removed.
103 The GTK+ filechooser implementation now uses GIO directly, which has
104 rendered external filesystem implementations unnecessary. Consequently,
105 the GtkFileSystem interface is no longer available, nor the filechooser
106 will load any GtkFileSystem implementation.
108 * GtkComboBox now renders the popdown button insensitive when
109 the model is empty. Applications which want to populate the list
110 only before displaying it can set gtk_combo_box_set_button_sensitivity
111 to GTK_SENSITIVITY_ON, so that the button is always sensitive or
112 GTK_SENSITIVITY_OFF to make it insensitive respectively.
114 * GtkAdjustment now enforces that values are restricted to the
115 range [lower, upper - page_size]. This has always been the documented
116 behaviour, and the recommended practice is to set page_size to 0
117 when using adjustments for simple scalar values, like in a slider
120 * gdk-pixbuf will use GIO for mime type detection if possible. For
121 this to work, shared-mime-info needs to be installed and XDG_DATA_DIRS
122 set accordingly at configure time. Otherwise, gdk-pixbuf falls
123 back to its built-in sniffing implementation.
125 Release notes for 2.12
126 ======================
128 * gtk_about_dialog_get/set_name() were deprecated in favour of
129 gtk_about_dialog_get/set_program_name(), the GtkAboutDialog now uses the
130 "program-name" property instead of the conflicting "name" property.
132 * The gdk-pixbuf tiff loader now requires libtiff 3.6.0 or later.
134 * Support for Windows 9x/ME has officially been removed. It hasn't worked
137 * The GtkTextBufferTargetInfo enumeration values have been changed from
138 G_MAXUINT-0, G_MAXUINT-1, G_MAXUINT-2, etc, to -1, -2, -3 to stay within
141 * A change in the handling of _NET_WM_USER_TIME properties on toplevel
142 windows can cause deadlock problems with window managers that are using
143 GDK for drawing decorations. In particular, metacity <= 2.18.0 is affected
144 by this. The problem has been fixed in metacity 2.18.1.
146 * Semi-private GtkTextLayout api has changed: new GtkTextLayout method
147 invalidate_cursors(), and new functions gtk_text_layout_invalidate_cursors()
148 and gtk_text_layout_cursors_changed(), which should be used in place of
149 gtk_text_layout_invalidate() and gtk_text_layout_changed() if invalidation
150 is due to marks moved or changed selection; new GtkTextLineDisplay structure
151 member. Source compatibility is preserved; binary compatibility may break
152 only if GtkTextLineDisplay structure was created on stack or as a part
153 of another structure (in particular GnomeCanvas and its clones do not need
156 * Another new signal has been added to GtkNotebook. The new signal
157 is called create-window, so this name can no longer be used for signals
158 in objects derived from GtkNotebook.
160 * The gtk_notebook_set/get_group_id() functions were found to be insufficient
161 and have been deprecated in favour of gtk_notebook_set/get_group().
163 * The move-focus signal has been moved to GtkWidget, to unify the
164 various implementations of this signal in specific widgets. Great care
165 has been taken to make sure that all code using this signal continues
168 * An unused and hardly visible GtkFrame has been removed from the menu
169 widget hierarchy when GtkComboBox::appears-as-list style property is
170 set. Any RC file applying a different style to any widget below the
171 widget path "gtk-combobox-popup-window.GtkFrame" should take into
172 account that the frame no longer exists.
174 * The external print preview application used by GtkPrintOperationPreview
175 is now passed the print settings on the command line with the
176 --print-settings parameter pointing to a temp file containing the
177 settings. The preview application assumes ownership of the file and
178 should delete it once it does not need it anymore. The --print-settings
179 commandline option is understood by Evince 0.9.0 and newer. To use a
180 different print preview application, change the gtk-print-preview-command
181 setting in your gtkrc file, e.g. gtk-print-preview-command = "ggv %f"
183 * GtkMenuShell is now defined as an abstract type. It was already
184 documented as an abstract class, and there is little reason to
187 * The GtkTooltips struct (this is the old tooltips API) is now considered
188 private. Code that used to access this struct, in particular the
189 tips_data_list field, will need to change. All of the old tooltips
190 API has been deprecated in favour of a new implementation and
191 API. This affects all of the gtk_tooltips_ functions, and functions
192 which take a GtkTooltips argument, such as gtk_tool_item_set_tooltip()
193 and gtk_menu_tool_button_set_arrow_tooltip().
195 * The memory management of the GtkRecentManager object has been changed,
196 as using the screen didn't guarantee that the singleton instance was
197 correctly destroyed. The screen-related functions have been deprecated,
198 and should not be used anymore; the GtkRecentManager instance returned by
199 the gtk_recent_manager_get_default() function is guaranteed to be valid
200 for the entire lifetime of an application.
202 * A number of interfaces that have been superseded by newer interfaces for
203 a long time have finally been deprecated. This includes
204 gtk_widget_ref/unref(), gtk_rc_style_ref/unref() and the old file selector.
206 * The various coordinate systems in use in GtkTreeView widgets have
207 been clarified in the documentation, and in the cause of doing so,
208 the functions gtk_tree_view_widget_to_tree_coords() and
209 gtk_tree_view_tree_to_widget_coords() have been deprecated in
210 favour of a new family of gtk_tree_view_convert_ functions.
212 * gtk_menu_item_remove_submenu() has been deprecated in favour of
213 gtk_menu_item_set_submenu (..., NULL).
215 * gtk_default_draw_check() has been fixed to really decrease the
216 indicator size by one pixel to ensure an odd size instead of
217 accidentially increasing it.
218 Consequently, gtk_cell_renderer_toggle_render() could be fixed to
219 not subtract 1 from the size passed to gtk_paint_option(), which
220 was just a workaround for above off-by-two for even sizes (theme
221 engines now get the real indicator size passed).
222 The default toggle size of GtkCheckMenuItem and GtkCellRendererToggle
223 has been changed to 13 to be consistent with GtkCheckButton.
224 The only visible change with default settings is that the indicator in
225 GtkCellRendererToggle has changed its size from 11 to 13 and is now
226 consistent with menus and toggle buttons.
228 * GTK+ has always required that gtk_init() (or a variant thereof) is
229 called before any other GTK+ function. Some applications call functions
230 like gtk_clipboard_get() to check if they need to call gtk_init(),
231 anyway. A change in GLib 2.14 has recently broken this unsupported
232 practise. It is worth pointing out that calling gtk_init() twice
236 Release notes for 2.10
237 ======================
239 * The hexadecimal Unicode input feature has been reworked. It no longer
240 blocks the use of the sixteen Ctrl-Shift-<hex digit> key sequences. Now
241 it only uses Ctrl-Shift-u.
243 * A memory leak in GtkStyle handling has been fixed. This may expose bugs
244 in third-party widgets which forget to call gtk_style_attach() in their
247 * Range widgets like GtkScrollbar now render their arrows insensitive
248 when the slider is at the end. Applications which react to arrow
249 clicks even if the slider is at the end may want to use the new
250 gtk_range_set_[upper/lower]_stepper_sensitivity() functions to
251 prevent the arrows from being rendered insensitive.
253 * GtkObject now uses the "floating reference" support in GObject.
254 GTK_OBJECT_IS_FLOATING() will still work, but direct checking
255 of the GTK_FLOATING flag will no longer detect the floating
256 reference. Details about floating references can be found in the docs:
257 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/gobject-The-Base-Object-Type.html#floating-ref
259 * Accelerators like (_F) are now stripped from labels when they are
260 displayed in toolbars. If this is not wanted, the feature can be
261 suppressed by inserting a Unicode control character, e.g ZWNJ.
263 * The pixbuf theme engine can now customize expanders (in GtkTreeView
264 and GtkExpander) and resize grips, using the new EXPANDER and
265 RESIZE_GRIP function values.
267 * Dialogs created by gtk_about_dialog_new() no longer hide automatically
268 when the user clicks close. It is the applications responsibility to
269 hide or destroy the dialog.
271 * Several new signals have been added to GtkNotebook. Care has been taken
272 to choose signal names which do not collide with signals added by well-known
273 derived classes. The names which can no longer be used for signals in
274 objects derived from GtkNotebook are page-reordered, page-removed and
277 * Due to the interface changes in the file chooser backend interface,
278 the GTK+ ABI version has been bumped to 2.10.0. Third-party filesystem
279 backends have to be ported to the new interface, other modules, such as
280 theme engines, input method modules or pixbuf loaders have to be rebuilt
281 so that they are installed in the right place for GTK+ to find them.
284 Release notes for 2.8
285 =====================
287 * GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 require the cairo library.
289 * The default theme has been renamed to "Raleigh". Existing configurations
290 specifying the "Default" theme name should still work.
292 * The GtkTreeView::enable-search property has been changed to control
293 only typeahead search, not the C-f keybinding to start an interactive
294 search. To turn off interactive searching completely, you have to
295 set GtkTreeView::search-column to -1.
297 * The restriction on using the same cell renderer in multiple columns
298 of a GtkTreeView is now more strictly enforced.
300 * In GTK+ 2.8, GtkCalendar uses nl_langinfo() (if available) to determine
301 the first day of the week. Thus, it is possible to select the first day
302 of the week independently from the language, by setting LC_TIME.
304 * In GTK+ 2.8, the gtk-update-icon-cache utility includes image data
305 in the icon caches, which will make the icon cache files larger than
306 the one produced by GTK+ 2.6. This change will reduce the memory
307 overhead of icon themes at runtime, since all GTK+ applications can
308 share the image data in memory.
310 * In 2.8, GDK emits GdkEventGrabBroken events when a keyboard or pointer
311 grab is broken. On X11, this can happen if the same application grabs
312 again, or if the window used for the grab becomes unviewable. It happens
313 more often on Win32. Applications which use grabs should pay attention
314 to these events and do the necessary cleanups when the grab is lost.
315 * The GIOChannel code for sockets on win32 has been rewritten.
316 Applications who make non-trivial use of GIOChannels on win32 should
317 be watched for possible problems.
319 * GLib 2.8 uses atomic operations to implement reference counting, thus
320 g_object_ref/unref, g_closure_ref/sink/unref and g_iochannel_ref/unref
321 can be used without locking in multithreaded applications. Note that
322 other modifications, like concurrent setting of properties still require
325 * g_convert() and related character set conversion functions have been
326 fixed to emit pending shift states and to not cache iconv descriptors
327 across multiple calls, since that is problematic for some encodings.
328 Note that these functions are not suitable for streaming conversions;
329 use g_iconv() to do streaming conversion.
332 Release notes for 2.6
333 =====================
335 * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistency. To make use of this feature,
336 a clipboard manager following the specification at
337 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/clipboard-manager-spec
338 must be running. A sample implementation of such a clipboard manager
340 http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/clipboard-manager-0.3.tar.gz
341 Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_clipboard_persistence()
342 to find out if clipboard persistence is available.
344 * Notification on clipboard ownership changes via GdkOwnerChange events
345 requires the XFIXES X extension. Applications can use the function
346 gdk_display_supports_selection_notification() to find out if ownerchip
347 change notification is available.
349 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme
350 specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environtment variable may be
351 necessary if your icons aren't installed in the default location
354 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 can make use of mmap()able cache files
355 to avoid a lot of disk searching overhead. GTK+ includes a utility named
356 gtk-update-icon-cache to generate these cache files. For further details,
357 see the gtk-update-icon-cache man page or the GTK+ documentation.
359 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GTK+, when compiled
360 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
361 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
362 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GTK+ program.
364 * The following functions have been deprecated in GTK+ 2.6:
365 gdk_pango_context_set_colormap
366 gtk_cell_renderer_editing_canceled
368 * The new GtkFileChooser widget emphasizes simplicity and thus does
369 not provide a navigation entry by default when opening files.
370 Experienced command line users will likely want to make heavy use of
371 the location dialog brought up by the Control-L key shortcut.
373 * The GTK+ libraries use an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
374 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
375 with prefixes such as _gtk, _gdk, and _pango will be exported
376 from the library, on others not. In no case can applications
377 use these private symbols. In addition to that, GTK+ 2.6 makes several
378 symbols private which were not in any installed header files and
379 were never intended to be exported.
381 * The gdk_pixbuf_xlib library included in the contrib/ directory
382 and the framebuffer GDK backend included in the gdk/linux-fb directory
383 of GTK+ are provided on an as-is basis and have not been tested at all.
384 No guarantees about the degree of workingness or about future
385 compatibility are provided.
387 * On Unix, the assumption of GLib and GTK+ by default is that filenames on
388 the filesystem are encoded in UTF-8 rather than the encoding of the locale;
389 the GTK+ developers consider that having filenames whose interpretation
390 depends on the current locale is fundamentally a bad idea.
392 If you have filenames encoded in the encoding of your locale, then you
393 may want to set the G_FILENAME_ENCODING environment variable:
395 G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale
396 export G_FILENAME_ENCODING
398 (Earlier versions of GLib 2.x required a different environment variable
399 setting; G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 to achieve the same effect; this
400 is still supported, but G_FILENAME_ENCODING is preferred.)
401 Best integration of GTK+ 2.6 with the environment is achieved by
402 using a UTF-8 locale.
404 On Windows, filenames passed to GTK+ should always be in UTF-8, as
405 in GLib 2.6. This is different than in previous versions of GTK+
406 where the system codepage was used. As in GLib, for DLL ABI
407 stability, applications built against previous versions of GTK+ will
408 use entry points providing the old semantics.
410 When compiling against GTK+ 2.6, applications intended to be
411 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
412 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
413 names have been constructed from strings returned from GTK+ or GLib.
419 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
420 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product gtk+.) You will need to create an
421 account for yourself.
423 In the bug report please include:
425 * Information about your system. For instance:
427 - What operating system and version
429 - For Linux, what version of the C library
431 And anything else you think is relevant.
433 * How to reproduce the bug.
435 If you can reproduce it with one of the tests or demos built with GTK+,
436 such as demos/gtk-demo/gtk-demo, that would be most convenient. Otherwise,
437 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a
438 last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software
439 that can be downloaded.
441 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the
444 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not
445 necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error,
446 it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test
447 program with the --sync command line option.
453 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the patch
454 fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment to that bug
457 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch, and attach
458 the patch to that bug report.
460 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -up option to GNU diff.)