GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 412130
Bump GTK+ version requirement to at least 2.6
Last modified: 2008-08-02 15:38:47 UTC
According to configure.in, the minimum required version of GTK+ is 2.2.3. However, we use Gtk.AboutDialog, which is only available in 2.6 or greater. I'd like this bug to track a decision about the minimum version of GTK+ required by Tomboy. Bumping to 2.6 will let us clean up configure.in (which checks for 2.6) and an #ifdef in libtomboy. Bumping to 2.8 would enable further cleanup in libtomboy (possibly including moving some of it to managed code) thanks to the addition of gtk_window_present_with_time(). Bumping to 2.10 would give us StatusIcon and printing for free, thus removing our dependencies on libegg and more libtomboy stuff. I've attached a patch that bumps our minimum required GTK/GDK to 2.6.0. This bump at least is required if we want to keep using Gtk.AboutDialog. (I could use help on the patch. Does ATK need to get bumped, too? Also, the output of configure doesn't indicate any gtk+ version checking.)
Created attachment 83355 [details] [review] First cut at patch to bump gtk+ min req to 2.6.0. Removes obsolete #ifdef in libtomboy, too.
That's strange that we've had such an old gtk+ requirement. Moving to 2.6 should be pretty safe. I also think it'd be fine to move to gtk+-2.8, but I'm not sure whether that would end up breaking anyone or not. Perhaps querying the mailing list would be the best route to clear up that question.
Committed to SVN. I don't think we're already using gtk+-2.8 features, but I don't have an older distro to test on. I'm guessing there are plenty of people out there running Ubuntu Dapper, Mono 1.1.13.6, with gtk-sharp2-2.6.x. If we want to support that generation of distros, we'd have to stick with gtk+-2.6. But yeah, I should probably email the list about this.
Also committed a bump to gtk-sharp2 >= 2.6.0.
2.8 : I don't see any problem with bumping to this, but there's also not much benefit. 2.10 : If we care about large deployments of GNOME/Tomboy, 2.10 is not a reasonable target at this time. :-( Just my thoughts.
This is a blocker for bug 349265.
Thanks, Jared. Noted.
My thoughts on this: As Tomboy is part of GNOME, and GTK+ is also part of GNOME releases: Any Tomboy version can safely depend on a GTK+ version that's shipped with the GNOME release including the tomboy version. So with current Tomboy releases you can safely depend on GTK+ 2.8. With the next ones, you can even depend on GTK+ 2.12.
In theory I agree with you (in fact, current GNOME depends on GTK+ 2.10, and has since GNOME 2.16). But the reality is that in huge deployments of GNOME (like the City of Largo, Florida), older distributions are shipped with updated packages, and it makes life difficult for these deployments if Tomboy depends on features that they do not have (especially since some distros ship with GTK+ 2.10 but only gtk-sharp 2.8). Since Tomboy is popular with office workers (most large deployments are for office workers), it is a difficult call to draw the line and say "now you're on your own". That's the main reason that we have been delaying the move to GTK+ 2.10, as far as I can tell. My personal opinion is that after sync is ready (and maybe tasks?), we will be in a good place to up our GTK+ requirement. It will take some work to update our code that depends on libegg, though.
Setting the default assignee and QA Contact to "tomboy-maint@gnome.bugs".
We already bumped to 2.10. Resolving.