GTK Development Blog

The past two weeks we’ve had DevConf and FOSDEM back to back, so the development slowed down a bit. Expect it to pick up again, now that we’re close to the GNOME 3.24 release.

In these last two weeks, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 34 commits, with 20973 lines added and 21593 lines removed.

Planning and status

• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Timm Bäder removed gtk_widget_class_list_style_properties() in the continuing effort to deprecate the style properties inside GtkWidget and replace them with CSS properties
• Timm also moved some of the state used only by GtkToggleButton subclasses into those types
• William Hua improved the Mir GDK backend for proper positioning of menus

Bugs fixed

• 777547 – Notebook arrow icon wrong color after closing final tab
• 773686 – Software when launched shows in dash with wrong icon, name and menu
• 775864 – getting-started: typo tie->the
• 778009 – menu drawn on top of menubar in Fedora

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 106 commits, with 7340 lines added and 12138 lines removed.

Planning and status

• Matthias Clasen released GTK+ 3.89.3
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Benjamin Otte simplified the clipping shaders for the Vulkan renderers
• Benjamin also removed the “assume numbers without dimensions are pixels” fallback code from the CSS parser
• Daniel Boles landed various fixes to the GtkMenu, GtkComboBox and GtkScale widgets
• Daniel also simplified the internals of GtkComboBox and moved most of its internal widgets to GtkBuilder UI files
• Matthias Clasen removed command line argument handling from the GTK+ initialization functions; gtk_init() now takes no arguments. Additionally, gdk_init() has been removed, as GDK ceased to be a separate shared library. The recommended way to write GTK+ applications remains using GtkApplication, which handles library initialization and the main loop
• Timm Bäder merged his branch that makes GtkWidget visible by default, except for the GtkWindow and GtkPopover classes; Timm also removed gtk_widget_show_all() from the API, as it’s not useful any more
• Timm modified GtkShortcutsShortcut, GtkFileChooserButton, and GtkFontButton to inherit directly from GtkWidget, taking advantage of the new scene graph API inside the base GtkWidget class

On the gtk-3-22 stable branch:

• Ruslan Izhbulatov fixed the Windows backend for GDK to ensure that it works with remote displays

Bugs fixed

• 777527 – GDK W32: Invisible drop-down menus in GTK apps when working via RDP
• 770112 – The documented <alt>left shortcut doesn’t work on Wayland
• 776225 – [wayland] dropdown placed somewhere in the screen
• 777363 – [PATCH] wayland: avoid an unnecessary g_list_length call

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 52 commits, with 10254 lines added and 9466 lines removed.

Planning and status

• Alex Larsson is working on two separate branches to optimize the memory allocation and fragmentation when building the GSK render tree, after profiling the tree building code
• Timm Bäder is working on a topic branch to switch widgets to be visible by default
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Rui Matos added support in the Wayland backend for the gtk-enable-primary-paste settings key; this requires a newer version of the gsettings-desktop-schemas
• Matthias Clasen and Alex Larsson refactored some of the GSK,  GtkWidget, and CSS internals to avoid excessive type casting and type checking after profiling the rendering code
• Matthias added a “system” tab to the GtkAboutDialog widget, for free-form, system-related information
• Matthias also updated the porting documentation for -gtk-icon-filter
• Benjamin Otte changed the X11 backend to always call XInitThreads() unconditionally, in order to safely use the Vulkan rendering API; this should be safe, but testing is encouraged
• Benjamin updated the GtkSnapshot API to ensure that render nodes are available only after the snapshot is complete
• Benjamin also fixed the handling of CSS images that have no explicit size but should be scaled according to their aspect ratio
• Timm Bäder added a revealed property to the GtkInfoBar widget and ported the GtkActionBar code to use it

On the gtk-3-22 stable branch:

• Ruslan Izhbulatov worked on fixing various cases of keyboard handling under Windows, including interaction with AeroSnap; Ruslan also fixed bug 165385, which was going to be 12 years old in 10 days
• Carlos Garnacho changed the EGL handling inside the Wayland backend to disable swap interval, as the compositor is in charge of timing the rendering
• Matthias Clasen deprecated additional API that has been removed from the development branch

Bugs fixed

• 776031 – W32: Winkey+down minimizes maximized window instead of restoring it
• 165385 – Win32 keyboard handling still incomplete
• 769835 – On Wayland, application containing GtkGLArea stops responding if it’s not on current workspace
• 774726 – GtkTreeView dnd: gtk_drag_finish remove row when reorder sinse 3.20
• 769214 – keyval field not filled correctly for Pause key
• 776485 – GDK W32: Impossible to restore maximized window via system menu
• 776604 – about dialog: Add a “system” tab
• 775846 – gdk/wayland: Add support for the gtk-enable-primary-paste gsetting

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 81 commits, with 12205 lines added and 12625 lines removed.

Planning and status

• Welcome back to This Week in GTK+ after the end of the year break
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Timm Bädert merged his work on moving the scene graph of widgets directly into the GtkWidget class; this allows widgets to have internal children without necessarily subclassing GtkContainer
• Timm also worked on porting widgets currently using the internal CSS gadget API to be composite widgets, like GtkSwitch
• Benjamin Otte and Georges Basile Stavracas Neto have been working on making the Vulkan GSK renderer work on Wayland
• Benjamin also worked on improving the efficiency of the Vulkan renderer
• William Hua worked on improving the Mir backend of GDK with regards to clipboard support

On the gtk-3-22 stable branch:

• Matthias Clasen released GTK+ 3.22.6

Bugs fixed

• 776627 – Correct PostScript capitalization
• 776868 – Improve the documentation of GtkEntry:attributes
• 776560 – icon-browser: window opens at very narrow size, only showing 1 column of icons
• 775732 – mir: clipboard support missing
• 776736 – build: Fix vulkan detection
• 776807 – GtkInspector doesn’t show up when Gtk is initialized through option group

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 20 commits, with 883 lines added and 2740 lines removed.

Planning and status

• Alex Larsson worked on a simplification of GdkWindow that removed native and foreign child windows; the long term plan is to have native windowing system surfaces only for top levels
• Alex also sent a review on gtk-devel-list of Benjamin’s wip/otte/rendernode branch, with ideas on future work for the GSK rendering API
• Chun-wei Fan updated the Windows backend to ensure that it continues to build and work on the master branch
• Benjamin Otte implemented the snapshot() virtual function in more GtkWidget subclasses.
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Olivier Fourdan updated the Wayland backend to ensure that empty input shapes are updated on sub-surfaces when needed; this allows other toolkits, like Clutter, to use the GDK sub-surface API
• Alex Larsson removed gdk_window_reparent() from the GDK API, since it’s unused and allows for the goal of only having top level GDK windows
• Benjamin Otte removed the ad hoc code from GdkCellView to modify its background, as the cell view can use CSS to achieve the same (or better) results
• Benjamin also removed the border node from the GtkFrame CSS nodes, as it performed additional immediate mode clipping that complicates the rendering

On the gtk-3-22 stable branch:

• Emmanuele pushed fixes for the GL rendering when using GtkGLArea with OpenGL ES 2.0 implementations that are missing the GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit extension

Bugs fixed

• 776132 – Mention the difference between gdk_window_create_similar_image_surface and cairo_surface_create_similar_image
• 774534 – [wayland] input shape and opaque region not applied without begin_paint()/end_paint()

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 103 commits, with 5986 lines added and 1896 lines removed.

Planning and status

• Benjamin Otte is working on a refactoring of the GSK render node API
• Emmanuele Bassi worked on a 3.x-specific branch that allows GDK to use EGL instead of GLX on X11 platforms
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Benjamin merged the Vulkan renderer for GSK, as comparison point for the GL and Cairo renderers. The Vulkan renderer adds a new optional dependency on a working Vulkan implementation, as well as glslc
• The Vulkan renderer also resulted in a large refactoring of the GL drawing code inside GDK, though this should not have caused any user-visible changes in the API
• Benjamin also implemented support for the CSS border-spacing property following the CSS 2.1 specification

On the gtk-3-22 stable branch:

• Matthias released GTK+ 3.22.5.

Bugs fixed

• 775651 – GdkX11-4.0.gir, GdkWin32-4.0.gir, and Gsk-4.0.gir are generated before Gdk-4.0.gir is ready

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 65 commits, with 1780 lines added and 2429 lines removed.

Planning and status

• A GTK+ hackfest is planned for March 2017; the main topic is going to be improving performance, especially with regards with rendering
• Benjamin Otte is reworking the GL renderer for GSK to ensure it’s well integrated into the GDK rendering
• Additionally, Benjamin is also working on an experimental Vulkan-based renderer for GSK
• Timm Bäder is changing the GtkWidget and GtkContainer API to converge the two classes into a single scene graph
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Matthias Clasen changed GTK to exit cleanly when it loses the display connection under X11 and Wayland; this change has also been backported to the stable gtk-3-22 branch
• Timm Bäder cleaned up various widgets to consistently use gtk_widget_measure() when measuring the size of their children
• Daniel Boles fixed a bug in GtkComboBox that caused a warning in Debian-based distribution that applied a downstream patch; see bug 771242 for more information; this change has also been backported to the stable gtk-3-22 branch

On the gtk-3-22 stable branch:

• Lapo Calamandrei backported the GtkProgressbar theme fixes for correctly identifying empty and full states

Bugs fixed

• 774915 – [Wayland]: Destroying the parent of a subsurface causes _gdk_window_destroy_hierarchy: assertion failed
• 771242 – 3.21: opening menu for certain types of GtkComboBox causes Gdk-CRITICAL assertion ‘GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)’ failed
• 775410 – gsk/Makefile.am runs g-ir-scanner before libgsk-4.la is linked
• 775319 – [Wayland]: gdk_window_get_toplevel() fails to return the toplevel of a child subsurface
• 775316 – gtk_drag_source_set_icon_pixbuf references the pixbuf received once too much
• 775212 – GtkScaleButton does not unref all GtkAdjustment it references
• 775525 – gtk_flow_box_get_child_at_index shouldn’t crash with an invalid index

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 40 commits, with 1551 lines added and 1998 lines removed.

Planning and status

• Matthias Clasen released the first GTK+ 3.89 development snapshot
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Andrew Chadwick landed a series of fixes for graphic tablets support on Windows
• Benjamin Otte removed the gtk_cairo_should_draw_window() utility function; the function was introduced for compatibility in the 3.x API, but now it’s not necessary any more
• Benjamin also removed gdk_window_process_updates() and gdk_window_process_all_updates(); GDK has long since been switched to a frame clock; additionally, only top level GdkWindow can be used as a rendering surface
• Lapo Calamandrei updated the High Contrast and Adwaita theme with the recent round of CSS improvements for progress bars and gradients

Bugs fixed

• 774114 – Window shadows are repainted even if only the contents of the window change
• 774695 – GtkProgressbar needs full and empty classes
• 774265 – No tilt for wintab devices
• 774699 – [wintab, potential segfault]: list iteration regression causes odd-indexed devices to be ignored during lookup & e.g. present no pressure
• 775038 – Build: Add wayland to GSKs dependencies
• 774917 – [wayland] child subsurfaces need to be placed relative to their parent
• 774893 – Application font sizes scaling gets clamped to 1.00 when starting GtkInspector
• 774939 – GtkLabelAccessible: Initialize link before setting parent
• 774760 – inspector: ensure controller is a GtkGesture
• 774686 – GtkMenu does not unref all GtkCheckMenuItem it creates
• 774743 – GtkNotebook does not unref all GtkBuiltinIcon it creates
• 774790 – GtkTextHandle does not unref all GtkAdjustment it references

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 167 commits, with 8048 lines added and 6858 lines removed.

Planning and status

• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• The default value of the GtkFileChooser:local-only property is now FALSE, which means that file selections dialogs will automatically show non-local resources.
• Benjamin Otte introduced the GtkSnapshot API, which works as a GskRenderNode builder for widgets, and aims to replace the immediate mode gtk_render_* family of functions.
• Benjamin also changed the GtkDrawingArea API, which now works using an explicit callback function, instead of a the generic GtkWidget::draw signal.
• Finally, Benjamin has implemented support for 3D CSS transformations in GTK+.
• The GDK API to read back the contents of a GdkWindow into a GdkPixbuf have been removed, as their behavior and result are platform-dependent.
• Matthias Clasen updated the GTK+ 3.x → 4.x porting guide, and the API reference, with the newest API additions.
• Simon Steinbeiss updated the CSS styling for GtkProgressbar to add the empty and full classes when the progress is set to 0.0 or 1.0, respectively.

Bugs fixed

• 774475 – wayland: gtk+ prevents using subsurfaces if the parent is not root
• 774476 – surfaces with no outputs get scale factor reset
• 774634 – GtkPlacesView does not unref all GDaemonFileEnumerator it references
• 773007 – GtkFilechooser gives completion for non-matching extensions
• 774609 – small fix to foreign drawing spinbutton demo
• 773587 – [PATCH] recent-manager: Add a limit to the list’s size
• 774352 – GtkAppChooserWidget does not unref all GAppInfo it references
• 774347 – Fails to build: unknown type name GdkColor
• 773601 – Display size detected as 0x0 pixels when RANDR is not available
• 774614 – Wrong #include in Print docs

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.

In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 46 commits, with 1541 lines added and 3471 lines removed.

Planning and status

• Emmanuele Bassi outlined a list of items to work on GSK on the wiki
• The GTK+ road map is available on the wiki.

Notable changes

On the master branch:

• Matthias Clasen worked on removing the custom -gtk-gradient CSS function and ensured that the standard radial-gradient and linear-gradient functions worked as defined by the CSS specifications
• Lapo Calamandrei ported Adwaita and other themes shipped by GTK+ to the standard CSS gradient definitions
• Benjamin Otte introduced a GskTexture API inside GSK to cache icon assets from GTK+ and avoid multiple texture uploads
• Timm Bäder removed the custom style properties used by GtkTreeView and GtkToolItemGroup, and replaced them with standard CSS properties
• Timm also removed the appears-as-list custom style property from GtkComboBox

On the 3.22 stable branch:

• Matthias Clasen released GTK+ 3.22.3
• Chun-wei Fan merged the HiDPI display support for Windows

Bugs fixed

• 774097 – GtkPrintOperation should not truncate job names
• 772075 – GTK+ uses a lot more CPU under Wayland than under X11
• 773916 – GtkComposeTable caches broken: using a same ~/.XCompose does not work twice in a row
• 773979 – GdkGLContext does not chain finalize handler
• 774046 – GtkSpinButton does not always unref priv->{up,down}_button
• 774066 – GtkHeaderBar does not unref all GtkBox and GtkSeparator it creates
• 774185 – GtkPlacesSidebar does not unref itself as many times as it references

Getting involved

Interested in working on GTK+? Look at the list of bugs for newcomers and join the IRC channel #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org.