So, you can see it's already been adopted by Artix and the AUR. There are unofficial DEB files (here), which I use for my Devuan systems (I keep the original GTK2 packages to avoid dependency breaks, but the GTK2-NG DEB files provide the newly maintained versions of GTK2, so no need to recompile anything).GTK2-ng: a community-maintained GTK+ 2.24 fork
An unofficial, community-maintained GTK+ 2.24 fork focused on modernizing GTK2 for current systems while preserving its traditional behaviour, ABI compatibility, performance and portability across Linux, BSDs, Windows/ReactOS and macOS.
GTK2-ng aims to improve modern build compatibility and long-term maintainability while preserving ABI compatibility, performance, stability, and the original GTK2 behaviour as much as possible.
The project is X11-first and does not force a migration to Wayland.
Backed by the devuanusers.com community and hosted on Devuan's Git server:
https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng
Highlights:Roadmap:
- Conservative GTK+ 2.24 maintenance with ABI compatibility as a priority
- Existing GTK2 applications should continue to run without recompilation
- X11-first approach with no forced Wayland migration
- Modern build-system cleanup for current Autoconf, Automake, Libtool and gtk-doc
- Compatibility fixes for current GCC and Clang versions
- Selected safe patches from AUR, BSDs, Gentoo, Fedora and GTK2 maintenance forks
- Internal Y2038-related time-handling improvements where ABI-safe
- Modernized private-data handling in many GTK/GDK classes
- Fixed many compiler and deprecation warnings without removing features
- Improved GtkFileChooser with optional icon view
- Classic list view remains available
- Better icon handling and reduced unnecessary overhead in the file chooser
- Preserved GTK2 theming, theme engines, input modules and print backends
- Preserved legacy configuration and module lookup behaviour
- Continued focus on performance, low overhead and responsiveness
Build and test instructions:
- Continue replacing deprecated internal API usage where safe
- Improve file chooser responsiveness for large and network directories
- Add best-effort thumbnail generation and optional preview support
- Improve compatibility with traditional GTK2 themes and engines
- Add XDG-aware config, theme and icon lookup paths while keeping legacy paths
- Review Ardour's YTK GTK2 fork for portable, ABI-safe improvements
- Review further GTK2 maintenance forks for useful fixes
- Preserve CUPS/PPD printing workflows and add libppd support for newer CUPS versions
- Improve the Win32 backend with the long-term goal of feature parity with the X11 backend (for ReactOS)
- Keep GTK2 useful on modern systems without breaking existing apps
- Choose a better long-term project name
Please use the build and test instructions from the project page:
https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng
The instructions there are more likely to be up to date than copied instructions in this forum post.
If you test GTK2-ng, please report:Thanks for testing. Feedback from real GTK2 applications is especially useful.
- your distribution
- your compiler version
- your GLib version
- your configure options
- the application you tested
- whether you used a test prefix or a system-wide install
- any warnings, crashes or broken behaviour you noticed
Since it has been picking up quite a bit of steam recently with a couple of FLOSS Web sites covering the fork, it would be nice to also see this picked up by Salix, or at least as a SlackBuild (I know this isn't the proper channel to ask, but nice thought to consider). There are still packages depending on GTK2 for Slackware 15.0, so I think this is nice to have, so as to ensure that GTK2 software will continue to build on newer distros.