One of the developers of the Devuan distribution presented project GTK2-NG, which will develop the fork of the GTK2 library aimed at continuing its maintenance and ensuring quality performance in modern distributions. Maintaining the fork will allow continued distribution of applications reliant on GTK2 in Devuan after termination GTK2 support in the Debian 14 distribution, which is expected to be released in the summer of 2027.
The developers of the GTK project have stopped supporting GTK2 more than five years ago, 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 through AUR). Among the significant projects, the audio editor Ardour continues to use GTK2, but this project does not depend on external libraries and supports its own GTK2 fork — YTK (opennet.ru). About 150 packages related to dependencies with GTK2 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.
In GTK2-NG added several dozen changes, mainly related to transferring fixes that were distributed as patches in packages from AUR and Debian, and fixing warnings issued by the compiler. Improvements include the modernization of the g_sort_array sorting function and replacing the scaling algorithm to enhance icon clarity. Issues in the file chooser widget have been resolved and optimization of the display of directory contents with a large number of files has been conducted. The build was tested using GCC 14 and Clang 21.
Plans for the future include transferring changes from the fork GTK2, being developed a participant of the Xlibre project — stefan11111, as well as backporting code from YTK (github.com), a GTK2 fork from the Ardour project. Among the tasks, verifying the build in GCC 15 and adding support for using libppd for printing on systems with CUPS 3.x is also mentioned. The possibility of using the GPLv3 license for the new code and changing the name to avoid claims from the GNOME project is not excluded.
Source: linux.org.ru
