General Information =================== This is GTK+ version @GTK_VERSION@. 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 * Suffixes 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. Release notes ============= * GTK+ 2.6 supports clipboard persistency. 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 ownerchip change notification is available. * The icon theme code in GTK+ 2.6 follows the freedesktop.org icon theme specification. Setting the XDG_DATA_DIRS environtment 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 toolchain, 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 filesystem 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 codepage 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 occured. * 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 should include the PATCH keyword in their keyword fields. If the patch adds to or changes the GTK+ programming interface, the API keyword should also be included. Patches should be in unified diff form. (The -u option to GNU diff.)