![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I was very interested to hear about a GTK 2 fork. I have enough programs and libraries to build a portable desktop environment. However, I really miss SciTE and that requires GTK to build on most systems. I had considered trying to revive a GTK 1.2 build just to get a minimal version of SciTE working. Amigo Linux had an updated version of GTK 1.2. However, when I heard about the GTK 2 fork, I decided to give building it a try and see how portable it would be and if it would work on the systems I'd want to run it on.
I ran a quick test build on Debian and it worked well. Then, I spent several days trying to get this working with my legacy MinGW compiler. It works. I'm not thrilled with the Perl or Python requirements in the build systems for GTK and its dependencies. I'm also not thrilled about the hard-coded paths for finding assets and files. If I decide to go any further with it, I'd introduce my path library so locations aren't necessarily hard-coded. I'd also like to find a way to remove the Perl or Python dependencies from the build. I'm using configure and make, so I may not bother to create my own CDetect configure and GNU makefiles. If I was using later versions of the dependency libraries that required meson and Python, I'd consider it.
I already have applications that build using SDL, FLTK, pdcurses, otk and Raylib/RayGUI. That's enough GUI support to provide a comprehensive list of desktop applications. They're also easy portable and don't require a great deal of dependencies to build. So, I can build and maintain programs I run on my system from source code and patch them as needed. That is one of the major points Free Software, to give people the ability to build and modify the programs they use. I'm not sure whether I'll be adding GTK 2 to the list of GUI, TUI and graphics libraries I work with, but it's nice to know that it can be built from source and that it works. It's now an option if I need it.
If anyone is interested in the source code, the gtk2-ng project is here:
https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng
I built it with glib 2.42.2, atk 2.14.0, pango 1.36.8, gdb-pixbuf 2.31.7 source code straight from the gnome.org site.
I ran a quick test build on Debian and it worked well. Then, I spent several days trying to get this working with my legacy MinGW compiler. It works. I'm not thrilled with the Perl or Python requirements in the build systems for GTK and its dependencies. I'm also not thrilled about the hard-coded paths for finding assets and files. If I decide to go any further with it, I'd introduce my path library so locations aren't necessarily hard-coded. I'd also like to find a way to remove the Perl or Python dependencies from the build. I'm using configure and make, so I may not bother to create my own CDetect configure and GNU makefiles. If I was using later versions of the dependency libraries that required meson and Python, I'd consider it.
I already have applications that build using SDL, FLTK, pdcurses, otk and Raylib/RayGUI. That's enough GUI support to provide a comprehensive list of desktop applications. They're also easy portable and don't require a great deal of dependencies to build. So, I can build and maintain programs I run on my system from source code and patch them as needed. That is one of the major points Free Software, to give people the ability to build and modify the programs they use. I'm not sure whether I'll be adding GTK 2 to the list of GUI, TUI and graphics libraries I work with, but it's nice to know that it can be built from source and that it works. It's now an option if I need it.
If anyone is interested in the source code, the gtk2-ng project is here:
https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng
I built it with glib 2.42.2, atk 2.14.0, pango 1.36.8, gdb-pixbuf 2.31.7 source code straight from the gnome.org site.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}