What’s new with the latest batch of crates and the reason for some incompatible changes? More automation.

No more features

You don’t have to set the target library versions in your Cargo.toml. The build script will query the installed library versions from pkg-config and instruct rustc via cfg arguments to compile the appropriate set of APIs.

All the APIs available in the installed library will just work but if you attempt to use newer ones, the build will fail. Presently, Rust doesn’t allow to generate custom error messages so there doesn’t appear to be a way to make such errors more friendly.

Note that a cargo issue will prevent cargo doc from generating the documentation or at least cause it to be incomplete.

Migration

Remove any features and default-features directives relating to Gtk-rs crates from your Cargo.toml.

Introducing autogenerated sys crates

From now on, the FFI definitions crates (except cairo-sys) don’t have to be maintained manually. They’re being generated from GObject introspection metadata. Take a look at the sys repo if you’re interested in details. This fixes incorrectly transcribed definitions and should avoid such human mistakes in the future.

The impact is converting many enums to bitflags they should have been from the beginning and some spelling changes.

Migration

  • Notable enum variants and consts that have effectively been renamed:
    • WindowType::TopLevel -> WindowType::Toplevel (changed the capitalization of ‘level’),
    • DialogFlags::Modal -> DIALOG_MODAL (a constant instead of an enum variant),
  • IconSize has to be cast to i32 until it’s replaced with a proper enum.

Examples diff.

These regular expressions should take care of renaming:

s/WindowType::TopLevel/WindowType::Toplevel/
s/DialogFlags::Modal/DIALOG_MODAL/
s/(IconSize::\w+)/$1 as i32/