[Glade-users] GtkBuilder and Libglade status

[email at micahcarrick.com (Micah Carrick)]

Thanks for the reply. You'll have to forgive some of my lack of 
knowledge in regards to the development process. I get a little confused 
as to who is working on what in regards to gtk-builder-convert, 
GtkBuilder, and Glade.

It's been about 6 months since working on my Glade 3 tutorial (Glade 
portion has been done since then) and now I have some time to finish it 
up and want to briefly explain to users the evolution of glade, 
libglade, and gtkbuilder so they aren't confused by examples elsewhere 
using different methods.

I see questions in emails, on www.gtkforums.com and other forum sites 
regarding GtkBuilder and Glade that I feel like I could be better 
equipped to answer....

Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> Ok, first of all, I wouldnt officially say there is support for saving
> in builder format
> from glade, 3.5.x is the development series and I think we still have
> 3 good months
> before a stable release. Albeit, initial support is there and some
> glade files may
> work.
>
> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Micah Carrick <email at micahcarrick.com> wrote:
> [...]
>   
> > Ultimately, I'm looking for known issues and status with saving to
> > GtkBuilder from glade and gtk-builder-convert, work arounds, and the
> > like. I'm hoping to get up to speed enough to help the people that are
> > trying to get into RAD with Glade but are scared by these errors. I
> > thought it would be good to jump into GtkBuilderConvert to stay up to
> > date, but perhaps it's better to change my tutorial to use Libglade?
> >     
>
> I am hoping that gtk-builder-convert can be made completely
> obsolete by the time we release Glade 3.6, I also dont want to encourage
> people to use libglade so I would say I personally would rather not see
> another tutorial about libglade, but that is up to you.
>   
That's perfect... just the type of information I would like to know. I 
will keep the tutorial as is for now (uses gtk-builder-convert with 
Glade 3.4) with a mention of Glade developers working on built-in 
GtkBuilder support.
>   
> > In either case, I would like to provide my readers with explanations as
> > much as I can and point them in the right direction to following the
> > status (related bug reports).
> >
> > I'm using Glade 3.5.2, GTK+ 2.12.19, and Libglade 2.6.2 (using Python).
> >
> > First, neither LibGlade nor GtkBuilder seem to like the <requires> tag
> > at the top of the file. I can't seem to find information on that. Is
> > that something that Libglade and GtkBuilder are going to support in the
> > future?
> >     
>
> Libglade invented the <requires> tag, for purposes or requiring libglade modules
> such as the libgnomeui module - I was under the impression that libglade was
> not going to complain if I added a version="2.4" in the requires tag -
> I also used
> a separate tag to depict the required version of gtk+ specifically, since I knew
> libglade would choke on that.
>
> But anyway, we will have to change the way we save this data at least for
> target versions of gtk+ <= 2.14 and probably be saving this info as comments,
> since gtkbuilder also doesnt like unrecognized tags.
>
> Also, if the required version tags dont work in libglade (dont they
> ?), please at least _file bugs_.
> (can you believe were talking about documenting bugs in a tutorial,
> but the developers were
> not even notified that those bugs exist ? *cough*communication breakdown*cough*)
>
>   
This is largely the intent of this post. From user emails and from 
www.gtkforums.com I see a lot of bugs come up. I am more than happy to 
help get these properly filed and point users to these bugs, however, 
I'm not quite clear where these should be filed and where I should 
search for them. This is where my ignorance comes in. I would prefer to 
write things like "Due to bug #xxxxxx, you may need to first delete..." 
or whatever so that the user can link to the bug and it's solutions. 
Here's my understanding...

If I find a bug in Glade, I should first check for it at bugzilla under 
glade3 product and if it's not found, file a new bug report.

If I find a bug when trying to run gtk-builder-convert, I should first 
check for it at bugzilla under gtk+ product and if it's not found, file 
a new bug report.

But then I sometimes find the bug in things like ubuntu's bug reports. 
Should I assume that bugs from there go to the same people and thus I 
don't need to worry about it being filed on bugzilla? As an example, I 
have seen Ubuntu bug #214267 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+2.0/+bug/214267 in posts 
on my website, gtkforums.com, and ubuntuforums.com. Should this be on 
bugzilla instead?

> > When saving as GtkBuilder, after deleting the requires tag, GtkMenuBar
> > widgets always seem to crash. Even when dropping a GtkMenuBar into a
> > GtkWindow without any other widgets, it crashes:
> >     
>
> I have a series of patches to gtk+ pending for GtkMenu/GtkMenuItem support
> (i.e. better construct property handling etc.), but I stalled on this
> - I'm not sure
> how much time I will have in this release cycle, there is a chance we
> wont support
> native GtkMenu structuring in this round, and try to only get
> GtkUIManager running
> instead.
>
>   
> > "GtkWarning: Attempting to add a widget with type GtkMenu to a container
> > of type GtkMenuItem, but the widget is already inside a container of
> > type GtkWindow, the GTK+ FAQ at http://www.gtk.org/faq/ explains how to
> > reparent a widget."
> >
> > When taking that same file but saved as a Libglade file and running
> > through gtk-builder-convert you get:
> >
> > "UnboundLocalError: local variable 'child' referenced before assignment"
> >
> > Which you can get around by removing any "use_stock" property from
> > GtkImageMenuItem widget, but then you don't get the stock icons
> > (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+2.0/+bug/214267/comments/3)
> >     
>
> Sounds like an awful lot of effort spent to document an unfinished
> work, I really
> wish people would spend this much effort to help finish the work.
>   
Well, I'll try to get better at helping. :)

My intention is not to document unfinished work so much as provide an 
up-to-date tutorial with mention of what to expect down the road (since 
the tutorial may be read a year from now). I will try to focus on Glade 
3.4 and gtk-builder-convert specifically (which is what it's based on 
now). I didn't even realize the Glade3 had the GtkBuilder saving option 
until today as a result of trying to help a new glade user on 
ubuntuforums.org who was having these same problems. I should have 
noticed I was using a development series... didn't even think of that 
(forgot I had installed that from source rather than using the one with 
the distro).
> Cheers,
>                        -Tristan
>
>   
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