Notices by GTK (gtk@floss.social)

Are you doing something cool with GTK or the GNOME application development platform? Do you want to talk about it in front of the GNOME community? Then you have until March 16 to submit a talk proposal for GUADEC 2025!

https://events.gnome.org/event/259/

#gnome #GUADEC #GUADEC2025

@mks_h it's how deprecations have always worked. It's perfectly fine not to know things: people can always ask.

Of course, this does not deter people with an axe to grind against the project.

It seems that a few people are being misinformed about the deprecation of the X11 backend, usually because they read screeds from well-known bad faith actors.

The X11 backend being deprecated mainly means that we're not going to spend time implementing new features, like dmabuf, graphics offloading, or Vulkan support. X11 support will still exist until GTK4 is EOL, which will happen once GTK *6* is released. We're talking about a 20 years horizon, at this point…

GTK and GLib developers will be in Brussels starting on Wednesday for a hackfest. The agenda is:

- Planning for the next version of GTK
- Accessibility, and the new accesskit backend
- Text handling
- Session saving
- Deprecating the X11 and Broadway backend
- Merging the Android backend
- App launching, portals, and cgroups
- Future of the type system

Make sure to follow the GTK development blog!

You may also bump into us around FOSDEM this weekend… 😉

Reminder: instead of using StackOverflow for your questions about GTK and the GNOME software stack, use the GNOME Discourse instance:

https://discourse.gnome.org

You can also use it for applications and the overall GNOME desktop.

#gtk #gnome #development

Important security update for GLib and D-Bus, thanks to @pwithnall

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/security-fixes-for-signal-handling-in-gdbus-in-glib/20882

If you are a downstream distributor of GLib, GTK, or GNOME-related projects, remember to follow the distributor tag on Discourse.

#glib #security

What GTK app are you working on?

#gtk #libadwaita #gnome

Matthias Clasen has written a post on the GTK blog about recent changes in the accessibility implementation of the toolkit, as well as improvements in the tooling planned for the 4.12 release: https://blog.gtk.org/2023/06/21/evolving-accessibility/

#accessibility #gtk #gtk4

It's important to note that more work is needed to improve the accessibility stack on Linux; if you want to contribute you can read the at-spi2-core developers documentation for an overview of the stack: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/at-spi2-core/devel-docs/index.html

We especially need more documentation on how ATs interpret the accessibility interfaces, and what kind of expectations should be satisfied by toolkits and apps.

We are dropping the Autotools build for GTK 3.x, and have fully switched to Meson. If you package GTK 3 and you are still using Autotools, now is the time to switch.

For more information, see the announcement on Discourse: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/removing-the-autotools-build-for-gtk-3/12764

#gtk #meson #autotools #distro #packaging

To those still wondering what kind of performance improvement Meson brings to an established project over Autotools, here are some numbers from the Yocto project after they switched their native GTK3 build recipe:

config (autotools): 38.5s
config (meson): 17.9s (-53.5%)
install (autotools): 11.2s
install (meson): 1.6s (-85.5%)
compile (autotools): 100.8s
compile (meson): 37.5s (-62.8%)

The build went from over 2 minutes to sub-1 minute