Re: Status of GTK 3 support?

[Philippe Michel]

On Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 02:36:13PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Debian is starting to look at slowly retiring GTK 2, at least as much as
> possible and with an understanding that it will take a long time.  I see
> that GnuBG has experimental support for GTK 3, but I'm not sure how
> unstable "experimental" means.

There has been only limited change in the GUI (or in general) since 
1.06.002.

It builds with GTK3 and is generally usable, but only with 2d boards. I 
did not use or stress it much though, and if someone else does he didn't 
report it... I'm sure there are display glitches, and possibly more 
serious problems when closing pop-ups in the wrong order or things like 
that.

It remains quite close to the GTK2 code, leading to a lot of deprecation 
warnings (the most common being the use of gtk_table widgets).
 
A few months ago, Jon Kinsey, who wrote the original 3d OpenGL code, 
started overhauling this part again. For now there are no significant 
functional changes, but, looking at comments and ifdefs, it seems making 
it work with GTK3 is one of his objectives.

In this regard, it would be useful if you could use a snapshot instead of 
1.06.002 release, especially if you can switch to newer snapshots from 
time to time.

I'm not sure what you mean by:
 
> Would it be reasonable to try to build 1.06.002 for Debian and Ubuntu with
> GTK 3?  Or, if not, to try a CVS snapshot?

Trying is certainly reasonable but committing to this toolkit for a 
forthcoming release is less clear.

As far as I can see, the is no one really knowledgeable in GUI 
programming currently maintaining gnubg. The GTK3 code was really a 
one-shot effort by a passing contributor. I can make minor changes or 
integrate submitted patches but that's about it. If you uncover more 
serious issues, it is far from certain they would be fixed quickly.

If Debian has testers or developers familiar with the issues related to 
the evolution of GUIs (GTK2 to GTK3, but things like behaviour under 
various desktop managers, multiple or high dpi screens, etc... as well), 
it would be nice to have them interested in gnubg.