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This is a temporary move that aims to make GTK's accessibility support independent of external components. ATK has lived outside of GTK since its inception, as it was meant to be a generic API implemented by different toolkits; that mostly failed, and we're now stuck with an abstraction layer that doesn't really abstract anything of value. What it did bring, on the other hand, was maintenance burden, with changes being propagated across different projects—ATK, GTK, and whatever accessibility layer implemented the bridge to ATSPI on Linux. This complexity is completely unwarranted for the benefits it gives us. Ideally, we'd get rid of ATK entirely, and expose the accessility API as part of the GTK namespace, but that is a fairly sizeable work, so we can start from this step. The ATK namespace is maintained, similarly to how we maintain the GDK, GSK, and GTK namespaces. The API is still public, so that GTK and out of tree widgets can consume it. The inclusion of ATK comes with the removal of the deprecated entry points and types, as that's a good chance to begin the cleanup of this mess of an API. Sadly, this also means we have to disable the a11y tests for the time being, as they depend on rando API from 2002. Another side effect of moving ATK in tree is that we cannot link to atk-bridge on X11, as that will link to the out of tree ATK; this means that accessibility is disabled on X11.
GTK — The GTK toolkit
General information
GTK is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off projects to complete application suites.
GTK is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the licensing terms for GTK, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all developers, including those developing proprietary software, without any license fees or royalties.
The official download location
The official web site
The official developers blog
Information about mailing lists can be found at
Nightly documentation can be found at
- Gtk: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/gtk/gtk/
- Gdk: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/gtk/gdk/
- Gsk: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/gtk/gsk/
Building and installing
In order to build GTK you will need:
You will also need various dependencies, based on the platform you are building for:
If you are building the X11 backend, you will also need:
- Xlib, and the following X extensions:
- xrandr
- xrender
- xi
- xext
- xfixes
- xcursor
- xdamage
- xcomposite
- atk-bridge-2.0
If you are building the Wayland backend, you will also need:
- Wayland-client
- Wayland-protocols
- Wayland-cursor
- Wayland-EGL
Once you have all the necessary dependencies, you can build GTK by using Meson:
$ meson _build .
$ cd _build
$ ninja
You can run the test suite using:
$ meson test
And, finally, you can install GTK using:
$ sudo ninja install
Complete information about installing GTK+ and related libraries can be found in the file:
docs/reference/gtk/html/gtk-building.html
Or online
How to report bugs
Bugs should be reported on the issues page.
In the bug report please include:
-
Information about your system. For instance:
- which version of GTK you are using
- what operating system and version
- for Linux, which distribution
- if you built GTK, the list of options used to configure the build
And anything else you think is relevant.
-
How to reproduce the bug.
If you can reproduce it with one of the demo applications that are built in the demos/ subdirectory, on one of the test programs that are built in the tests/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise, please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software that can be downloaded.
-
If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the crash occurred.
-
Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but is not necessary.
Release notes
The release notes for GTK are part of the migration guide in the API reference. See:
Licensing terms
GTK is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or, at your option, any later version, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
Please, see the COPYING file for further information.