About Me

Hello Everyone! I am Shivam, I am currently pursing my engineering in Electronics. I have been selected for GSoC 2026 for the port of GNOME-Gitg from GTK 3 to GTK 4. I am starting this blog in order to document my journey of porting Gitg . I have been contributing in GNOME from several months and in awe with the supportive and helpful nature of the community.

Project

As many of you probably know, Gitg is still using GTK3, which means it misses out on a lot of the improvements and features that came with GTK4. The main goal of this project is to port Gitg from GTK3 to GTK4 and then gradually modernize the application.

The scope of the project itself is quite large, and that’s honestly one of the most exciting parts for me. Working on this port will help me understand the application interacts with different libraries and components behind the scenes.

At the same time, I hope that this work will help the new contributors like me easier to get started contributing to the various GNOME projects

Conclusive Goal

The final goal of this project is to get Gitg building and running completely with GTK4 dependencies. At the moment, the application still fails to compile, which is expected since many GTK3 APIs are still present throughout the codebase.A separate GTK4 branch already exists where parts of the migration work have been started, and several components have already been adapted to GTK4. This project will continue building on top of that existing effort and gradually move the remaining parts of the application to the newer toolkit.

I would also like to sincerely thank the contributor(s) who have worked on the GTK4 porting work earlier. Their efforts created the foundation for this project, and I’ll be continuing from the work they have already done.

Thank You For Reading!

PS:- I would also like to thank Alberto Fanjul for mentoring me in this project and Felipe Borges for this time and support.