GNOME 3.0 and Ubuntu Natty are currently undergoing a major architectural shift from GTK 2.0 to 3.0. Part of this is that the previous set of manually maintained language bindings, such as PyGTK, are being deprecated in favor of GObject Introspection, a really cool technology!

For us this means that we have to port all our PyGTK applications from PyGTK 2 to gobject-introspection and GTK 3.0 at the same time. I started with that for my own projects (Apport and Jockey) a few days ago, and along the way encountered a number of problems. They are being fixed (particular thanks to the quick responsiveness of John Palmieri!), so I guess after a few of those iterations, porting should actually become straight forward and solid.

So now I’m proud to announce Apport 1.16 which is now fully working with GTK 3.0 and pygobject-introspection. I just uploaded it to Ubuntu Natty, where it can get some wider testing. I also have a pygi/GTK3.0 branch for Jockey, which is also mostly working now, but it’s blocked on the availability of a GIR for AppIndicator. Once that lands, I’ll release and upload the Jockey as well.

For other people working on porting, these are the bugs and problems I’ve encountered:

• [pygobject] GtkMessageDialog constructors did not work at all. This was fixed in pygobject 2.27, so it works fine in Natty, but there is little to no chance of making these work in Ubuntu 10.10.
• [pygobject] Gtk.init_check() crashes (upstream bug). It’s not strictly necessary, though, just avoids crashes (and crash reports) when calling it without a $DISPLAY. I’ll put that back once that gets fixed.
• [pygobject] You can’t pass unicode objects as method arguments or property values (upstream bug). Method arguments were recently fixed in upstream git head, and I backported it to the Natty package, so these work now. Property values are still outstanding. The workaround for both is to convert unicode values to bytes with .encode('UTF-8') everywhere.
• [pygobject] pygi-convert.sh is a great help which automates most of the mechanical rewriting work and thus gets you 90% of the porting done automatically. It’s currently missing MessageDialog constants, and is a bit inconvenient to call. I sent two patches upstream (upstream bug) which improve this.
• [GIR availability] libnotify did not build a GIR yet (upstream bug). This was fixed in upstream git head with some contributions of mine, and I uploaded it to Natty. This works quite well now, although add_action() crashes on passing the callback. This is still to be investigated.
• [GIR availability] There is no Application Indicator GIR, as already mentioned. Our DX team and Ken VanDine are working on this, so this should get fixed soon.
• [GTK] Many dialogs now scale in a very ugly manner: Instead of resizing the contents, the dialog just grows huge outer padding. This is due to a change of the default “fill” property, and apparently is not fully understood yet (upstream bug). As a workaround I explicitly added the fill property to the top-level GTKBox in my GTKBuilder .ui files. (Note that this happens in C as well, it’s not a GI specific bug.)
• [GTK] Building GtkRadioButton groups is currently a bit inconvenient and requires special-casing for the first group member, due to some missing annotations. I sent a patch upstream which fixes that (upstream bug).
• [GTK] After initial porting, a lot of my dialogs got way too narrow with wrapped labels and text, because GTK 3 changed the behaviour and handling of widget and window sizes. This is intended, not a bug, but it does require some adaptions in the GtkBuilder files and also in the code. The GTK 2 → 3 migration guide has a section about it.

Despite those, I’m impressed how well gobject-introspection already works. It was relatively painless for me to generate a GIR from a libnotify (thanks to the annotations already being mostly correct for building the documentation) and use it from Python. In another couple of months this will be rock solid, and porting our bigger pygtk projects like ubiquity and software-center will hopefully become feasible.

Tags: Apport, development, gnome, gobject, gobject-introspection, gtk3, introspection, jockey, porting, programming, python