[platform-dev] GTK4 Support in SWT / new GLIBC required for GTK3 in 2025

[Christoph Läubrich <laeubi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everyone,

since today, SWT[1] ships GTK4 support for Linux x86, to enable this 
with your SWT Application you need to specify

    SWT_GTK4=1

as an environment variable, please share any bugs or improvements and of 
course any help for improving GTK4 is welcome.

There are currently some architectures outstanding to enable GTK4:

- aarch64
- ppc64le
- riscv64

reach out to the SWT team if you are interested in any of these and like 
to see GTK4 for them as well!

As part of this effort it was required to update some build dependencies 
resulting in a higher version of GLIBC (at least 2.36 for x86 other 
architectures might require higher versions) this usually means you need 
at least:

- Debian 12 or recent Ubuntu
- Centos 9
- ... or similar depending on your distribution

to run SWT (and in particular Eclipse) Applications, especially if you 
are running UI tests and still using the deprecated centos-8 image [2] 
you need to upgrade your builds to the new ubuntu based ones.

best
 Christoph

[1] https://github.com/eclipse-platform/eclipse.platform.swt/
[2] 
https://github.com/eclipse-cbi/jiro-agents/tree/master?tab=readme-ov-file#deprecated-images