Hi folks,
It seems that this discussion may be partly moot anyway as 2018-12 and 2018-09 already require at least GTK 3.7.6, perhaps later?
In July it was announced[1] that 3.0 was going to be the minimum version of GTK. But changes[2] in the code base before 2018-09 was released means that SWT does not work in (for example) GTK 3.6. The reason is that the change uses a method in GTK that had its internal name changed between GTK 3.7.4 and 3.7.6. The GTK_TYPE_TEXT_VIEW_ACCESSIBLE macro changed[3] the symbol used. So if you try and run Eclipse on an older GTK you get the following and a JVM failed to start error popup.
/home/tools/local/java/Linux64/jdk8u172-b11/bin/java: symbol lookup error: /home/hall/eclipse.2018.12/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/456/0/.cp/libswt-pi3-gtk-4922r31.so: undefined symbol: gtk_text_view_accessible_get_type
as older GTK versions the symbol was _gtk_text_view_accessible_get_type. (The GTK version for the above error is 3.6.2, I coincidentally came across it yesterday when doing a customer site visit and came across an old Fedora 18 machine.)
Just to be clear, I am not asking for support for such old GTKs, but rather for the documentation/N&N[4] to specify what the minimum GTK really is.
As a related issue, the above type of failure means that the checks in Display.java (createDisplay) are also not working as intended because instead of a warning to System.out ("***WARNING: SWT requires GTK[...]") eclipse fails to load in OS.java's static initialization where it does the loadLibrary.
Would you like me to turn any of the above into bug reports?
Thanks,
Jonah