One of the developers of the Devuan distribution has introduced the GTK2-NG project, which will develop a fork of the GTK2 library aimed at continuing its maintenance and ensuring quality operation in modern distributions. Maintaining the fork will allow the continued delivery of applications tied to GTK2 in Devuan after support for GTK2 ends in the Debian 14 distribution, which is expected to be released in the summer of 2027.
The developers of the GTK project have stopped maintaining GTK2 for over five years, and packages with GTK2 have already been removed from the official repositories of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, openSUSE, and Arch Linux (available via AUR). Among significant projects, the Ardour audio editor continues to use GTK2 but is not dependent on external libraries and supports its own GTK2 fork — YTK. About 150 packages related to GTK2 dependencies remain in the Debian repository, including afterstep, Double Commander, fpc, gkrellm, gmpc, hexchat, lazarus, mplayer, navit, pidgin, sane-frontends, scim, sylpheed, tickr, tilem,
uim, usermode, xsane, xzgv, and z88.
GTK2-NG has added several dozen changes, mainly related to the incorporation of fixes distributed as patches in packages from AUR and Debian, and the correction of warnings issued by the compiler. Improvements include the modernization of the g_sort_array function for sorting arrays and the replacement of the scaling algorithm to enhance the clarity of icons. The file chooser widget (filechooser) has resolved existing issues and undergone optimization
for displaying directory content with a large number of files in icon view. The build has been tested using GCC 14 and Clang 21.
Future plans include integrating changes from the GTK2 fork developed by project participant Xlibre — stefan11111, as well as backporting code from YTK, the GTK2 fork from the Ardour project. Additional tasks also include verifying the build in GCC 15 and adding support for using libppd for printing on systems with CUPS 3.x. There is a possibility of utilizing the GPLv3 license for the new code and changing the name to avoid claims from the GNOME project.
Source: opennet.ru
