[sane-devel] gtk+-2.0 is born

[Nick Lamb]

On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 11:31:43PM +0100, Oliver Rauch wrote:
> This means that xscanimage, xcam and xsane will not compile
> with gtk+-2.0 without several (a lot of) changes.

The zeroth thing to do is panic. Don't do that. API versioning remains
in place so users can run GTK+ 1.2 and GTK+ 2.0 apps on the same system
at the same time.

The first thing to do as far as I can tell is to ship versions of this
software which don't say "I'll take whatever version of GTK+ you have,"
but rather insist on a version that they will actually compile against.
This applies just as much to GTK+ 2.0 as to GTK+ 1.2, the toolkit is not
dead and it will continue to evolve slowly in 2.1 etc.

AFAIK Instructions for how to do this have been available for two or
more years, so I'm sure you'll be able to find them. Basically you want to
ask for GTK+ 1.2 and if you can't get it, tell the user which version(s)
they DO have and why it's not good enough :)

After that there is a conversion guide available (also for a long time)
which in particular shows how to restore deprecated features (such as
the Gamma widget) to get your code running again quickly, and what the
replacements are for certain deprecated functions. Finally there is a
guide to future portability which says "Try to do <this> rather than
<that> because the latter will go away in future versions of GTK+"

I don't think anyone expects XSane in particular or the SANE project in
general to start using GTK+ 2.0 immediately, so you have plenty of time
to make any needed changes. These are no longer the days when The GIMP
and SANE would compete to require the most bleeding edge 0.99.x GTK+

Nick.