Increasing trunk libgtk dependency to 2.22.0?

[John Ralls]

On Apr 13, 2012, at 1:32 PM, Christian Stimming wrote:

> Am Freitag, 13. April 2012, 21:48:37 schrieb Christian Stimming:
>> Currently, SVN trunk requires libgtk-2.18.1. However, recently (in r22086
>> from patches in bug#672161) some new code was added that uses functions
>> that were introduced in gtk-2.22, e.g. gtk_assistant_commit.
>> 
>> Can we increase our required libgtk to 2.22? Current Ubuntu 11.10 comes with
>> 2.24.6; other up-to-date distros probably with similar versions. What do
>> you think?
> 
> Here's the most recent discussion for this issue:
> http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2011-November/032931.html
> and thread.
> 
> In that discussion and still today, the issue is that if we want SVN trunk to 
> be compilable on RHEL6, we are stuck with at most gtk-2.18.9 [1], which in 
> turn was released in March 2010. This would mean no major GUI code upgrades 
> are possible with SVN trunk. A newer RHEL major release cannot be expected 
> before summer this year, so maybe even later.
> 
> However, given that there isn't any current motion in gnucash to turn SVN 
> trunk into a new stable series (2.5 and 2.6), I'd say we should drop RHEL6 
> support of trunk and instead move to newer gtk versions here. This would at 
> least enable all the preparation work for gtk3/gnome3 migration work, because, 
> as discussed in the original thread, the gtk3 migration suggests to first move 
> to gtk-2.24. I'd propose to do exactly this: Moving to gtk-2.24. 
> 
I was just finishing up this reply to your first letter, but it didn't require much tweaking.

I guess it depends on when we're going to ship 2.6. Gtk 2.18 was tagged in 2009, 2 years before RHEL 6's release. Gtk 2.24 was tagged in January 2011, so if RHEL 7 is released next year (which is what the rumor seems to be, and it's consistent with the ~2 year cycle they've been following) they'll have had the same 2 years to get happy with it, so I would hope that it will come with 2.24. Debian Testing already includes 2.24 and is likely to become stable sometime in the next year. So if we target a 2.6 release for 2013 to coincide with RHEL 7, we should be OK with requiring 2.24.

On a technical basis, Gtk+-2.24 is the final Gtk+-2 branch, and I agree that moving to it for 2.6 is the right thing to do. Among other things, it would let us replace GConf with gsettings, which would open up (when built with a newer GLib) using the recently-added Mac defaults backend, finally freeing us from the dbus mess.

Regards,
John Ralls