GKrellM Maintenance and GTK 3 port

After a few GKrellM related questions arriving via email over the last few months I took another look at the different GTK 3 porting attempts and forks of the code. I approached the author of one of the forks and picked up some well organized commits to make GKrellM build without any deprecated Glib or Gtk 2.x functionality. GKrellM in git now requires the last GTK 2 release, which is GTK 2.24.x.

This also lead to some patches from various Linux distributions like Debian, Gentoo as well as OpenSUSE getting integrated so new releases won’t need them anymore.

There have been numerous other improvements since then including native GnuTLS support for the mail check, an XDG desktop file and icons for Linux desktops, a systemd service for gkrellmd and a new About dialog that gives an overview over all the people who have contributed code and translations to GKrellM over the years. For an overview over all the changes there is a new changelog file.

All of this will hopefully soon be part of GKrellM 2.4.0. Sadly, it will also be the first release without the original creator of GKrellM, Bill Wilson, who passed away in 2021 ☹️

What about GTK 3?

The big elephant in the room with any GTK 3 porting will be figuring out how to render everything with Cairo instead of the ancient GTK/GDK drawing functionality. There are some early experiments with cairo but nothing finished so far. The hope is that a GTK 3 port will become feasible once the code builds with GDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED. These changes will also break compatibility with existing plugins because they will of course also need to be ported to Cairo and GTK 3.