[Gambas-user] News about Gambas 3.7 release and why it is delayed

[Benoît Minisini]

Hi,

Here are news about Gambas 3.7 release and why it has been delayed...

It's mainly because of a nasty bug in keyboard management in the GTK+ 
component. The good news is that it is now fixed at 90%.

The short explanation : GTK+ keyboard events management sucks.

The long explanation : keyboard management is based on "input methods" 
that are the way complex text (non ASCII) is entered in a control.

Contrary to QT, GTK+ has no way to insert some management code just 
after the input method has entered text, and just before the control 
gets it.

So there is no clean way to raise the Gambas "KeyPress" event with the 
inserted text and to allow the user to cancel it if he wants to.

So I had to spend hours and hours to try different workarounds and dirty 
hacks.

It seems that I have finally some code that works with all input 
methods, except the XIM input method for controls others than TextBox, 
ComboBox and TextArea.

The symptom is that compound keys ("^" + "e" to make an "ê" for example) 
do not send event on controls others than TextBox, ComboBox and TextArea.

Don't ask me why, I have no idea. It may be my fault, but as there is no 
documentation on how to correctly use the GTK+ input method API...

When you use Ubuntu, the default GTK+ input method seems to be IBUS, 
which is correctly handled in all cases. But when you use Mint, the 
default input method is XIM, which has the problem described above.

I will wait a few days to be sure that I didn't break everything in 
gb.gtk, and if Fabien is agree, I will release Gambas 3.7.

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Minisini