Package glibmm 2.68 API series

[Sebastien Bacher]

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glibmm/-/blob/master/NEWS

'2.68.0 (stable):
This is the first stable release in the glibmm-2.68 ABI series.
It is parallel-installable with the glibmm-2.4 ABI.'

[Alejandro Claro (aclaro)]

Good morning Sebastien,

can you please describe why is it a problem to upgrade Glibmm?

We are affected by an issue in the current version (2.58). After some changes in GTK+ theme mechanisms in order to be able to configure the CSS class names properly it is important to be able to call gtk_widget_class_set_css_name() in the object instance init function.

However, this was not possible until Glibmm team add the support to this in version 2.60. Without these change there is no way to solve the problem. The discussion about this can be found in GNOME issue tracking:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glibmm/issues/33
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtkmm/issues/17

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Alejandro, this bug is simply a note about early development releases like 2.61.1 and 2.63.1. The bug is to help the Ubuntu Desktop Team track out-of-date packages more effectively.

This bug does not have anything to do with updating stable versions of glibmm which are found in even numbers like 2.58, 2.60, etc.

Ubuntu 19.10 will be released in 2 weeks with glibmm 2.60 available.

[Alejandro Claro (aclaro)]

Thank you for your answer Jeremy. Now it's clear to me.

[Alejandro Claro (aclaro)]

Please can somebody indicate whether this is still an issue or not?

We have some products that cannot be upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 yet, and the version of Glibmm in Ubuntu 1804 (Glibmm 2.56) has some important compatibility issues after some design changes in glib. The mechanisms to solve this issue were introduced in Glibmm 2.60:

https://developer.gnome.org/glibmm/2.60/classGlib_1_1ExtraClassInit.html

I would like to ask to please increase the version in Ubuntu 18.04, to at least Glibmm 2.60 or to include a patch to introduce the solution. The patch is included in this issue report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glibmm2.4/+bug/1846699

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

@Alejandro, the issue you are having hasn't to do with the report you are commiting on, recent series of Ubuntu have > 2.60 version, the report here is specifically to document to ignore a currently unstable serie

[Alejandro Claro (aclaro)]

Thanks @sebastien!

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

This needs to be packaged as a new source package since it's intended for glibmm 2.66 to continue to be used for GTK3 apps but the new version is intended for GTK4 apps.