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Comment by ghfdaghkj | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used GTK in a long time, but when I was using it, I was under the impression that pygtk was being deprecated, and everyone should be using GObject-Introspection instead.

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I dunno—I was making assumptions, not being very familiar with the GTK scene in Python.

Not me either anymore. I tried to port to introspection + Gtk3 but ran into problems with widget subclasses and no documentation to resolve it with.

I only extensively used it from Perl and Vala, but with GObject-Introspection I tend to more often look at the original library documentation than something language specific. This can be a disadvantage at first, but for me it turned out more convenient, since GIR-inflated bindings can be more complete, as long as the inflation supports the features the API describes. They also tend to be more consistent in their differences to the original.

The problem about documentation seems to be the usual dilemma that as soon as you know enough to implement an API browser reading GIR that outputs the API in your language, you know enough about how the bindings work themselves to just use the original documentation.

well it doesn't really explain how to port from pygtk or how python classes interact with g-i.

That is true, and unfortunately I have used Python only sparingly until now, and have no experience using PyGtk at all.

I took a quick look at PyGObject[0] (unsure if that is what one would actually use for this), and the most helpful part seems to be [1], giving some hints on extending GObject.Object, which should be translatable to extending other existing GObject type classes.

As for porting, I agree that can be a pain in that case. When bindings move from a manual implementation to inflating it from an external description. You often end up with good tutorials for the first, and good API reference for the second. If I need to understand other kinds of Gtk bindings, I search for examples on custom TreeModels or other potentially messy things like that to get a feel for it.

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/PyGObject?action... [1] http://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/objec...

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