[Gretl-devel] Re: Windows and gtk3
On Fri, 9 Aug 2019, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Am 08.08.2019 um 23:58 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
> The current (GTK2) gretl for Windows uses the native Windows theme by
> default, but also offers the "Clearlooks" theme which some people
> might prefer. (Also "Raleigh", which is unadorned GTK2 and looks
> pretty dated, but -- I find -- is at least always legible.)
Is there actually a planned end-of-support horizon for GTK2, or will the
GTK people offer it "forever" in parallel to GTK3?
They won't take it off their servers; GTK1 is still available!
The last release of GTK2 was version 2.24.32 (2018-01-08). I doubt
there will be another release unless perhaps a serious bug is found,
but that in itself is quite unlikely: GTK2 is about as close to
bug-free as any complex software can be.
Maybe more to the point is how long Linux distributions will
continue support for GTK2. I don't expect that to go away soon
(there are still plenty of interesting applications that haven't
been ported to GTK3). However, it's not really a problem for us if
it does go away. GTK3 is the default GUI toolkit for gretl on Linux
(Personally, I build gretl both ways: I want to check that the GTK3
version is OK but I prefer GTK2 myself.)
As for our Windows and OS X packages, neither platform supports any
form of GTK natively and we pack everything in our installers, so we
really don't care. The only reason to transition to GTK3 would be if
we can get a substantially nicer look thereby -- which I doubt but
do not dogmatically rule out!
Allin