Notes from the GTK+ BoF

* 3.24

• We brought back some much-requested APIs: font chooser additions, Emoji support, move-to-rect
• We brought back some APIs that make porting to GTK+ 4 easier: event controllers

Suggestion by Owen:

• Ask application authors to finish 3.30 versions that use GTK+ 3.24
• Then encourage them to port to GTK+ 4 with a promise of having a GTK+ 4 release for 3.32

* 4.0

Libraries that need to make the jump to unblock applications:

• webkit
• vte
• libchamplain

Suggestion: redo the documentation for the file chooser to recommend the native file chooser

Leftovers for GTK+ 4

• finish dnd changes: gestures for gtk level, local shortcuts - Benjamin

• subsurface / GtkRoot - Benjamin

• transformations - Benjamin
• shortcuts event controller - Christian, Carlos
• text view porting - Matthias
• vte port - Debarshi
• webkit port - ?
• champlain port - ?
• gtkvnc ?
• gtkspice ?

Suggestion by Alex: give up the gdk/gsk/gtk split

• Agreed: we should merge gdk and gsk
• Agreed: we should introduce gtk subdirectories like css

30 minute break

Topic: what fell off the gtk4 shortlist

• Christian: designer support. What we need:
  • move towards composition
  • layout manager that is separate from container implementation
• Emeus and designer support will be external for gtk4, it is gtk5 material
• Benjamin: shader compiler and shader api. What we need:
  • Direct3D backend ?
• Christian: text view
  • discussion of various options for getting text view to use text nodes instead of a single cairo node

Things that need to be done for GTK 4

• Profile the cairo backend, and make it perform as well as GTK+ 3

• Port GtkTextView to use text render nodes

• Shortcut event controller

Feature requests

• "Symbolic webm"

Lunch break

• GLib discussion
  • agreed: merge the icon fallback branch
  • open discussion of including an icon theme in gtk
  • GProperty may happen for 2.60. Some discussion around docs

  • extended error reporting with GError -> more discussion in GLib issue 14

  • discussion of things that did not happen
  • Unicode data tables - use icudata ? maybe not
  • g_autoptr - Nirbheek will look into whether it works on windows now

  • Further notes here: https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2018/Hacking%20days/GtkBOF/Notes/GLib

10 minute break

• Discussion of Shortcuts event controller - prototype exists in libdazzle, Christian will extract it

GTK backend discussion

• the win32 backend is in ok shape
• win32 backend has ci, and the build works
• some people on irc provide answers and help with features
• quartz backend has not been kept up
• we don't have ci for quartz
• we don't have gl hookup
• christian has a macbook that he's willing to hook up to gnome ci
• Nirbheek suggests that we could use travis ci for os x
• More windows discussion:
  • Benjamin not hopeful about gtk3 on windows
  • Others not convinced
  • Nirbheek thinks win32 build will be much improved with meson

Roadmap discussion