General Information =================== This is GTK+ version 2.10.2. GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off projects to complete application suites. GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the licensing terms for GTK+, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all developers, including those developing proprietary software, without any license fees or royalties. The official ftp site is: ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk The official web site is: http://www.gtk.org/ Information about mailing lists can be found at http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html Installation ============ See the file 'INSTALL' Release notes for 2.10 ====================== * The hexadecimal Unicode input feature has been reworked. It no longer blocks the use of the sixteen Ctrl-Shift- key sequences. Now it only uses Ctrl-Shift-u. * A memory leak in GtkStyle handling has been fixed. This may expose bugs in third-party widgets which forget to call gtk_style_attach() in their realize functions. * Range widgets like GtkScrollbar now render their arrows insensitive when the slider is at the end. Applications which react to arrow clicks even if the slider is at the end may want to use the new gtk_range_set_[upper/lower]_stepper_sensitivity() functions to prevent the arrows from being rendered insensitive. * GtkObject now uses the "floating reference" support in GObject. GTK_OBJECT_IS_FLOATING() will still work, but direct checking of the GTK_FLOATING flag will no longer detect the floating reference. Details about floating references can be found in the docs: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/gobject-The-Base-Object-Type.html#floating-ref * Accelerators like (_F) are now stripped from labels when they are displayed in toolbars. If this is not wanted, the feature can be suppressed by inserting a Unicode control character, e.g ZWNJ. * The pixbuf theme engine can now customize expanders (in GtkTreeView and GtkExpander) and resize grips, using the new EXPANDER and RESIZE_GRIP function values. * Dialogs created by gtk_about_dialog_new() no longer hide automatically when the user clicks close. It is the applications responsibility to hide or destroy the dialog. * Several new signals have been added to GtkNotebook. Care has been taken to choose signal names which do not collide with signals added by well-known derived classes. The names which can no longer be used for signals in objects derived from GtkNotebook are page-reordered, page-removed and page-added. * Due to the interface changes in the file chooser backend interface, the GTK+ ABI version has been bumped to 2.10.0. Third-party filesystem backends have to be ported to the new interface, other modules, such as theme engines, input method modules or pixbuf loaders have to be rebuilt so that they are installed in the right place for GTK+ to find them. Release notes for 2.8 ===================== * GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 require the cairo library. * The default theme has been renamed to "Raleigh". Existing configurations specifying the "Default" theme name should still work. * The GtkTreeView::enable-search property has been changed to control only typeahead search, not the C-f keybinding to start an interactive search. To turn off interactive searching completely, you have to set GtkTreeView::search-column to -1. * The restriction on using the same cell renderer in multiple columns of a GtkTreeView is now more strictly enforced. * In GTK+ 2.8, GtkCalendar uses nl_langinfo() (if available) to determine the first day of the week. Thus, it is possible to select the first day of the week independently from the language, by setting LC_TIME. * In GTK+ 2.8, the gtk-update-icon-cache utility includes image data in the icon caches, which will make the icon cache files larger than the one produced by GTK+ 2.6. This change will reduce the memory overhead of icon themes at runtime, since all GTK+ applications can share the image data in memory. * In 2.8, GDK emits GdkEventGrabBroken events when a keyboard or pointer grab is broken. On X11, this can happen if the same application grabs again, or if the window used for the grab becomes unviewable. It happens more often on Win32. Applications which use grabs should pay attention to these events and do the necessary cleanups when the grab is lost. * The GIOChannel code for sockets on win32 has been rewritten. Applications who make non-trivial use of GIOChannels on win32 should be watched for possible problems. * GLib 2.8 uses atomic operations to implement reference counting, thus g_object_ref/unref, g_closure_ref/sink/unref and g_iochannel_ref/unref can be used without locking in multithreaded applications. Note that other modifications, like concurrent setting of properties still require locking. * g_convert() and related character set conversion functions have been fixed to emit pending shift states and to not cache iconv descriptors across multiple calls, since that is problematic for some encodings. Note that these functions are not suitable for streaming conversions; use g_iconv() to do streaming conversion. Release notes for 2.6 ===================== * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistence. To make use of this feature, a clipboard manager following the specification at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/clipboard-manager-spec must be running. A sample implementation of such a clipboard manager is available at http://people.imendio.com/andersca/archives/clipboard-manager-0.3.tar.gz Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_clipboard_persistence() to find out if clipboard persistence is available. * Notification on clipboard ownership changes via GdkOwnerChange events requires the XFIXES X extension. Applications can use the function gdk_display_supports_selection_notification() to find out if ownership change notification is available. * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable may be necessary if your icons aren't installed in the default location /usr/share/icons. * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 can make use of mmap()able cache files to avoid a lot of disk searching overhead. GTK+ includes a utility named gtk-update-icon-cache to generate these cache files. For further details, see the gtk-update-icon-cache man page or the GTK+ documentation. * To reduce code size and improve efficiency, GTK+, when compiled with the GNU tool chain, has separate internal and external entry points for exported functions. The internal names, which begin with IA__, may be seen when debugging a GTK+ program. * The following functions have been deprecated in GTK+ 2.6: gdk_pango_context_set_colormap gtk_cell_renderer_editing_canceled * The new GtkFileChooser widget emphasizes simplicity and thus does not provide a navigation entry by default when opening files. Experienced command line users will likely want to make heavy use of the location dialog brought up by the Control-L key shortcut. * The GTK+ libraries use an '_' prefix to indicate private symbols that must not be used by applications. On some platforms, symbols beginning with prefixes such as _gtk, _gdk, and _pango will be exported from the library, on others not. In no case can applications use these private symbols. In addition to that, GTK+ 2.6 makes several symbols private which were not in any installed header files and were never intended to be exported. * The gdk_pixbuf_xlib library included in the contrib/ directory and the framebuffer GDK backend included in the gdk/linux-fb directory of GTK+ are provided on an as-is basis and have not been tested at all. No guarantees about the degree of workingness or about future compatibility are provided. * On Unix, the assumption of GLib and GTK+ by default is that filenames on the file system are encoded in UTF-8 rather than the encoding of the locale; the GTK+ developers consider that having filenames whose interpretation depends on the current locale is fundamentally a bad idea. If you have filenames encoded in the encoding of your locale, then you may want to set the G_FILENAME_ENCODING environment variable: G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale export G_FILENAME_ENCODING (Earlier versions of GLib 2.x required a different environment variable setting; G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 to achieve the same effect; this is still supported, but G_FILENAME_ENCODING is preferred.) Best integration of GTK+ 2.6 with the environment is achieved by using a UTF-8 locale. On Windows, filenames passed to GTK+ should always be in UTF-8, as in GLib 2.6. This is different than in previous versions of GTK+ where the system code page was used. As in GLib, for DLL ABI stability, applications built against previous versions of GTK+ will use entry points providing the old semantics. When compiling against GTK+ 2.6, applications intended to be portable to Windows must take the UTF-8 file name encoding into consideration, and use the gstdio wrappers to access files whose names have been constructed from strings returned from GTK+ or GLib. How to report bugs ================== Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system. (http://bugzilla.gnome.org, product gtk+.) You will need to create an account for yourself. In the bug report please include: * Information about your system. For instance: - What operating system and version - What version of X - For Linux, what version of the C library And anything else you think is relevant. * How to reproduce the bug. If you can reproduce it with one of the tests or demos built with GTK+, such as demos/gtk-demo/gtk-demo, that would be most convenient. Otherwise, please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software that can be downloaded. * If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the crash occurred. * Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error, it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test program with the --sync command line option. Patches ======= Patches should also be submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org. If the patch fixes an existing bug, add the patch as an attachment to that bug report. Otherwise, enter a new bug report that describes the patch, and attach the patch to that bug report. Bug reports containing patches that add to or change the GTK+ programming interface should include the API keyword in their keyword fields. Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU diff.)