GTK2 EOL

[NicoHood]

GTK2 has reached its end of life. Correct me if I am wrong, but the arduino ide still uses GTK2? That should be fixed now, almost every other application is GTK3 ready now.

Also see:
https://archlinux.org/todo/gtk-2-eol/
https://blog.gtk.org/2020/12/16/gtk-4-0/

It does mean, however, that GTK 2 has reached the end of its life. We will do one final 2.x release in the coming days, and we encourage everybody to port their GTK 2 applications to GTK 3 or 4.

[CReimer]

I ran pacman -Rdd gtk2 and your arduino package still works fine. So no GTK2 dependency?

[NicoHood]

Some recently opened another issue about arduino and gtk2 for archlinux. He pointed out, that there were some gtk2 related comments in the changelog:

Arduino/build/shared/revisions.txt

Line 176 in c33fb9f

* Fixed: on some newer Linux distributions, NPE when loading GTK look-and-feel without libgtk2 installed

So is gtk2 support now fully optional? Do we still need gtk3 then or even 4 or maybe none at all?

[xyproto]

@NicoHood It doesn't look like much is happening on the upstream side with regards to upgrading Arduino from GTK+2. How do you feel about changing the arduino package to makedep on gtk2-compat and depend on gtk3?

[NicoHood]

Does this work? What is the difference between gtk2-compat and gtk2?

[xyproto]

@NicoHood gtk2-compat uses gtk3 but offers gtk2-like configuration files and header files. It does not work for every project, but it appears to work for arduino.