Some time ago, at Planet Gnome, I started to stumble upon some news about a PyGTK deprecation. According to that last link, PyGTK 2.24 was it’s last release. This module is being replaced by GObject Introspection, or how it’s being called around here: PyGI.

For those who want some more info about this change, I strongly suggest to follow the Ubuntu App Development Week, they made 2 sessions about the PyGTK deprecation and how PyGI will work. The first one is GObject Introspection: The New Way For Developing GNOME Apps in Python, JavaScript and Others, with Tomeu Vizoso, and the other was PyGTK is dead, long live PyGI! Using gobject-introspection in Python, with Martin Pitt.

Based on others libraries that I saw disappear (HAL for example), I can say that PyGTK will still be around for a while. So, there’s no need to rush and port your GTK app, we got pleanty of time for this. Beyond that, there is no official PyGI documentation (at least I haven’t found). According to what I read, the PyGI module is already available in many distributions. You can test it with the following line:

$ python -c 'from gi.repository import Gtk; print Gtk'

There is only a slight problem, everything is outdated. All the significant changes are being prepperad to be pushed to Ubuntu 11.04 and Debian Unstable.

But one thin is sure, when I put my hands on an updated version of PyGI I’ll post some tutorials about how to write GTK applications using Python and PyGI. Until then…