Assuming Maintainership of gtk3-rs
This news isn’t quite fresh, but last month I took over maintainership of gtk3-rs, the official Rust binding for GTK3. It had been unmaintained and archived for years, since it’s a small team, and most development effort had been (quite reasonably) focused on gtk4-rs and the gtk-rs-core crates.
I’ve been using gtk3-rs in xfwl4, for drawing UI elements like the alt+tab window and window dropdown menus. It was unfortunate to be using an unmaintained library, especially one whose dependencies (on the core gtk-rs crates for glib, gio, etc.) could not be updated to the latest maintained versions.
I realized I’d sent a couple PRs to the project in the past, and I also maintain a Rust binding for Xfce libraries, so I’m familiar enough with the architecture and tooling around it. It seemed like it would be reasonable and not-too-difficult to maintain.
I spent a few weeks updating its dependencies, modernizing the code base a bit, and made the first 0.19 release last week.
My future plans are mostly simple maintenance: bug fixes, adding small features (like better support for subclassing), and keeping pace with development and releases of the gtk-rs-core crates. I expect breaking API changes to be at a minimum (mainly as a result of breaking gtk-rs-core updates).
If you have problems or contributions, head over to the issue tracker or submit a pull request.
Finally, I’d like to thank Sebastian Dröge and Bilal Elmoussaoui, who were open to the idea of a new maintainer, and reviewed my PRs and added me to the org.
Xfwl4’s Second Preview Release
I’m pleased to announce the second preview release of xfwl4, Xfce’s Wayland compositor, version 4.21.1.
Thank you to all who provided feedback and filed issue reports on the first preview. I’ve fixed a lot of issues and added quite a few missing features.
Here are the essentials:
Source tarball. Build and install instructions are in the README. Please pay careful attention to build and runtime prerequisites.
Issue tracker. Search the issue tracker first in case someone else has already filed a similar issue. If not, and you file a new one, be sure to fill out every part of the issue template.
Git repository. If you’ve
found an issue, it would be helpful if you could ensure it’s still
present on git main. You can also try any fixes and features I’ve added
since the release. Be sure to clone it with --recursive.
Again, please take a look at the README for runtime dependencies. xfwl4 will build and start without those runtime dependencies met, but some functionality may not work if you have older versions of some Xfce components and libraries. That list has been updated with newer versions since the first preview release.
You can check out the list of closed
issues in
this release. Note that there are more changes and fixes than are
reflected there, as not everything I’ve done has an associated issue
(and there are some issues filed and closed in other Xfce components
that enabled some of this work). The NEWS file has the full list of
commits and translation updates.
Anyhow, enjoy, and let me know how it goes.