Remi Cardona

As I'm sure all you Gnome lovers already know, Gnome 2.20 has been released. [Cue the now traditional props to all the Gnome Hackers for their brilliant work] As neither Daniel nor Mart have blogged about it, I'll take it up and give some news about Gnome in Gentoo.

This past weekend, we've brought gtk+-2.12 and its friends (glib, pango and atk) from the gnome overlay.

We've already seen a bunch of stuff break from it, from Xfce (for which Samuli had a nice patch ready) to some unexpected packages like OpenOffice and netscape-flash if used outside Gnome or Xfce (e.g. in Kde or *box). Patches are pending, please bear with us while we figure out where to really patch things in a smart way.

Another round of breakage is probably going to be more widespread, but waaay easier to fix. For some unknown reason, some upstream devs decide to ship their tarballs with this kind of cruft lying around in their configure.ac :

-DG_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGDK_PIXBUF_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGNOME_DISABLE_DEPRECATED

It's like shipping makefiles with -Werror in them. While this is a great idea for development releases or SCM checkouts, this is a nightmare for official releases. In our case, the GtkTooltip API was completely revamped and the old API marked as deprecated. So stuff that used to build just fine with gtk 2.10 now breaks with gtk 2.12. The old API is still there, but those #defines block you from using it.

So if any Gnome Hackers are reading Planet Gentoo, please think of downstream maintainers and don't put those #defines in stable tarballs. Thanks a bunch from the Gnome Herd

Other than that, we'll probably start masking and moving the rest of Gnome 2.20 over the next weekend and week. None of us want to have 2.20 be like 2.18 where we were almost 2 months behind every other distro. No ETA yet for unmasking.

Cheers