[Sugar-devel] GTK 4.0 Release

[James Cameron]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 10:45:32AM +0100, Martin Guy wrote:
> On 18/12/2020, Chihurumnaya Ibiam <ibiamchihurumnaya at gmail.com> wrote:
> > GTK 4.0 was released a few days ago This means that in no distant
> > time we'll be looking at porting activities to GTK4.
> 
> Given that the OSes that Sugar is based on will take several years
> to include that in their stable releases, and that GTK3 will be
> included for the next ten or twenty years, as GTK 1, 2 are
> currently, can you explain how that will help the Sugar system,
> given all the other work that needs doing?

We don't know when GTK4 will be included in distributions, but it's a
fair bet that Fedora will include it in the next stable release, and
Debian soon after.  What will drive that process is other applications
in the GNOME ecosystem completing their ports.

Yes, GTK 2 is mostly still available.  We had to port activities from
GTK 2 to GTK 3 in order to gain access to all the other APIs we wanted
to start using.

We never used GTK 1 with Sugar, as far as I know.  (I still have a GTK
1 program that I wrote ... and it is staying alive for daily use by
using LD_LIBRARY_PATH and copies of libraries from that era.  It is
_very_ fast.)

> Also, I doubt that an activity ported to GTK4 will continue to run
> on GTK3 hence not on all the systems that don't have GTK4 yet, as
> the point of a major release is usually that its API is not
> compatible, so I expect that work to break the activities one by one
> for all practical purposes.

Yes.  In particular, we'll probably need a Sugar Toolkit for GTK 4
before an activity can be ported to GTK 4.

-- 
James Cameron
https://quozl.linux.org.au/