gtk3 and gnucash

[Paolo Borelli]

Hi John!

    I understand from your reply that the win32 port is not your top
priority, but I wanted to point out some things about the current
state of gtk on Windows.

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 2:59 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> As for win32 improvements, no, I haven't seen anything to support that there are any. The latest binaries on www.gtk.org are 3.6, which Tarnyko did 2 years ago. There aren't any gtk3 binaries at all on master.gnome.org, only gtk2 ones from 4 years ago. I see a whopping 8 commits this year in gdk/win32.
>

I agree that it is unfortunate that we do not have a proper win32 page
on the site, but I can assure you that the win32 port made huge
progress: most of the fixes are not in the gdk backend which is pretty
self contained, but in individual widgets and underlying libraries. We
are using glib 2.42 gtk 3.14 successfully on Windows.

The lack of standardization on www.gtk.org is also due to the fact
that there are a few different approaches to use gtk on Windows,
depending on your goal and tools:

1) If you are cross compiling, fedora provides updated binaries of the
whole stack and I am pretty sure other distros have similar packages.
The downside of these binaries is that they are built with a runtime
dependencies on the GNU toolchain, so they cannot be used for
interoperability with MSVC

2) MSYS2 has updated binaries and provides a very efficient way to
build your gtk app on windows with mingw.
http://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/08/01/how-to-build-your-gtk-application-on-windows/
has more information and you can see from
https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/tree/master/mingw-w64-gtk3
that things are kept up to date. Incidentally msys2 provides binary
builds of a lot of other libraries as you can see from that repository
and it is also relatively easy to extract these libraries and use them
with MSVC

3) In case you prefer/need to use MSVC (e.g. you already build your
application with MSVC and you want to be able to easily step into
glib/gtk functions when debugging), we are working on a powershell
script that builds the whole gtk3 stack at
https://github.com/nice-software/gtk-win32 based on the similar script
made by the hexchat developers for gtk2 at
https://hexchat.github.io/gtk-win32/


I hope that helps, and if anyone listening wants to help with the
port, all patches are more than welcome.


Ciao,

     Paolo