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 2.12
31 ======================
33 * Functions: 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 Release notes for 2.10
38 ======================
40 * The hexadecimal Unicode input feature has been reworked. It no longer
41 blocks the use of the sixteen Ctrl-Shift-<hex digit> key sequences. Now
42 it only uses Ctrl-Shift-u.
44 * A memory leak in GtkStyle handling has been fixed. This may expose bugs
45 in third-party widgets which forget to call gtk_style_attach() in their
48 * Range widgets like GtkScrollbar now render their arrows insensitive
49 when the slider is at the end. Applications which react to arrow
50 clicks even if the slider is at the end may want to use the new
51 gtk_range_set_[upper/lower]_stepper_sensitivity() functions to
52 prevent the arrows from being rendered insensitive.
54 * GtkObject now uses the "floating reference" support in GObject.
55 GTK_OBJECT_IS_FLOATING() will still work, but direct checking
56 of the GTK_FLOATING flag will no longer detect the floating
57 reference. Details about floating references can be found in the docs:
58 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/gobject-The-Base-Object-Type.html#floating-ref
60 * Accelerators like (_F) are now stripped from labels when they are
61 displayed in toolbars. If this is not wanted, the feature can be
62 suppressed by inserting a Unicode control character, e.g ZWNJ.
64 * The pixbuf theme engine can now customize expanders (in GtkTreeView
65 and GtkExpander) and resize grips, using the new EXPANDER and
66 RESIZE_GRIP function values.
68 * Dialogs created by gtk_about_dialog_new() no longer hide automatically
69 when the user clicks close. It is the applications responsibility to
70 hide or destroy the dialog.
72 * Several new signals have been added to GtkNotebook. Care has been taken
73 to choose signal names which do not collide with signals added by well-known
74 derived classes. The names which can no longer be used for signals in
75 objects derived from GtkNotebook are page-reordered, page-removed and
78 * Due to the interface changes in the file chooser backend interface,
79 the GTK+ ABI version has been bumped to 2.10.0. Third-party filesystem
80 backends have to be ported to the new interface, other modules, such as
81 theme engines, input method modules or pixbuf loaders have to be rebuilt
82 so that they are installed in the right place for GTK+ to find them.
88 * GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 require the cairo library.
90 * The default theme has been renamed to "Raleigh". Existing configurations
91 specifying the "Default" theme name should still work.
93 * The GtkTreeView::enable-search property has been changed to control
94 only typeahead search, not the C-f keybinding to start an interactive
95 search. To turn off interactive searching completely, you have to
96 set GtkTreeView::search-column to -1.
98 * The restriction on using the same cell renderer in multiple columns
99 of a GtkTreeView is now more strictly enforced.
101 * In GTK+ 2.8, GtkCalendar uses nl_langinfo() (if available) to determine
102 the first day of the week. Thus, it is possible to select the first day
103 of the week independently from the language, by setting LC_TIME.
105 * In GTK+ 2.8, the gtk-update-icon-cache utility includes image data
106 in the icon caches, which will make the icon cache files larger than
107 the one produced by GTK+ 2.6. This change will reduce the memory
108 overhead of icon themes at runtime, since all GTK+ applications can
109 share the image data in memory.
111 * In 2.8, GDK emits GdkEventGrabBroken events when a keyboard or pointer
112 grab is broken. On X11, this can happen if the same application grabs
113 again, or if the window used for the grab becomes unviewable. It happens
114 more often on Win32. Applications which use grabs should pay attention
115 to these events and do the necessary cleanups when the grab is lost.
116 * The GIOChannel code for sockets on win32 has been rewritten.
117 Applications who make non-trivial use of GIOChannels on win32 should
118 be watched for possible problems.
120 * GLib 2.8 uses atomic operations to implement reference counting, thus
121 g_object_ref/unref, g_closure_ref/sink/unref and g_iochannel_ref/unref
122 can be used without locking in multithreaded applications. Note that
123 other modifications, like concurrent setting of properties still require
126 * g_convert() and related character set conversion functions have been
127 fixed to emit pending shift states and to not cache iconv descriptors
128 across multiple calls, since that is problematic for some encodings.
129 Note that these functions are not suitable for streaming conversions;
130 use g_iconv() to do streaming conversion.
133 Release notes for 2.6
134 =====================
136 * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistency. To make use of this feature,
137 a clipboard manager following the specification at
138 http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/clipboard-manager-spec
139 must be running. A sample implementation of such a clipboard manager
141 http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/clipboard-manager-0.3.tar.gz
142 Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_clipboard_persistence()
143 to find out if clipboard persistence is available.
145 * Notification on clipboard ownership changes via GdkOwnerChange events
146 requires the XFIXES X extension. Applications can use the function
147 gdk_display_supports_selection_notification() to find out if ownerchip
148 change notification is available.
150 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme
151 specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environtment variable may be
152 necessary if your icons aren't installed in the default location
155 * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 can make use of mmap()able cache files
156 to avoid a lot of disk searching overhead. GTK+ includes a utility named
157 gtk-update-icon-cache to generate these cache files. For further details,
158 see the gtk-update-icon-cache man page or the GTK+ documentation.
160 * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GTK+, when compiled
161 with the GNU toolchain, has separate internal and external entry
162 points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with
163 IA__, may be seen when debugging a GTK+ program.
165 * The following functions have been deprecated in GTK+ 2.6:
166 gdk_pango_context_set_colormap
167 gtk_cell_renderer_editing_canceled
169 * The new GtkFileChooser widget emphasizes simplicity and thus does
170 not provide a navigation entry by default when opening files.
171 Experienced command line users will likely want to make heavy use of
172 the location dialog brought up by the Control-L key shortcut.
174 * The GTK+ libraries use an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that
175 must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning
176 with prefixes such as _gtk, _gdk, and _pango will be exported
177 from the library, on others not. In no case can applications
178 use these private symbols. In addition to that, GTK+ 2.6 makes several
179 symbols private which were not in any installed header files and
180 were never intended to be exported.
182 * The gdk_pixbuf_xlib library included in the contrib/ directory
183 and the framebuffer GDK backend included in the gdk/linux-fb directory
184 of GTK+ are provided on an as-is basis and have not been tested at all.
185 No guarantees about the degree of workingness or about future
186 compatibility are provided.
188 * On Unix, the assumption of GLib and GTK+ by default is that filenames on
189 the filesystem are encoded in UTF-8 rather than the encoding of the locale;
190 the GTK+ developers consider that having filenames whose interpretation
191 depends on the current locale is fundamentally a bad idea.
193 If you have filenames encoded in the encoding of your locale, then you
194 may want to set the G_FILENAME_ENCODING environment variable:
196 G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale
197 export G_FILENAME_ENCODING
199 (Earlier versions of GLib 2.x required a different environment variable
200 setting; G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 to achieve the same effect; this
201 is still supported, but G_FILENAME_ENCODING is preferred.)
202 Best integration of GTK+ 2.6 with the environment is achieved by
203 using a UTF-8 locale.
205 On Windows, filenames passed to GTK+ should always be in UTF-8, as
206 in GLib 2.6. This is different than in previous versions of GTK+
207 where the system codepage was used. As in GLib, for DLL ABI
208 stability, applications built against previous versions of GTK+ will
209 use entry points providing the old semantics.
211 When compiling against GTK+ 2.6, applications intended to be
212 portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into
213 consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose
214 names have been constructed from strings returned from GTK+ or GLib.
220 Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system.
221 (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product gtk+.) You will need to create an
222 account for yourself.
224 In the bug report please include:
226 * Information about your system. For instance:
228 - What operating system and version
230 - For Linux, what version of the C library
232 And anything else you think is relevant.
234 * How to reproduce the bug.
236 If you can reproduce it with one of the tests or demos built with GTK+,
237 such as demos/gtk-demo/gtk-demo, that would be most convenient. Otherwise,
238 please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a
239 last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software
240 that can be downloaded.
242 * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the
245 * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not
246 necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error,
247 it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test
248 program with the --sync command line option.
254 Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the patch
255 fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment to that bug
258 Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch, and attach
259 the patch to that bug report.
261 Bug reports containing patches should include the PATCH keyword in their
262 keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GTK+ programming
263 interface, the API keyword should also be included.
265 Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU diff.)