Hello!
I’m following the development of libadwaita with much interest. Its widgets would make my life easier when porting my extension’s preferences to GTK4, will it be safe to assume it will available on systems where GNOME is installed?
The question may be a bit premature, you don’t have to give me a firm answer 
will it be safe to assume it will available on systems where GNOME is installed?
This depends on distributions really. And by the looks of it its not likely libadwaita will be ready or that core apps will depend on it by the GNOME 40 release.
Thank you for your answer!
Once we move the Adwaita theme to libadwaita, it will be pretty much mandatory for all of GNOME to link against libadwaita, so it will be pretty much guaranteed to be present. Current thinking is to expect that for GNOME 41.
will it be safe to assume it will available on systems where GNOME is installed?
A sneaky way to make sure of that is to come up with a reason for gnome-shell to use it in the org.gnome.Shell.Extensions D-Bus service. That’s the process that loads the extension prefs and opens the dialog, so any of its dependencies are guaranteed to be available to the extension code as well.
When the Adwaita theme is moved to libadwaita, as Matthias pointed, that would be enough of a reason, right? I guess the process will need it to display extensions’ preferences dialog with the correct theme.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to raise a serious point.
Although there’s some question on how to hook that up without linking to libadwaita I guess.
In the meantime, I almost effortlessly ported my extensions’ quite complex preferences to GTK4 in a few hours thanks to gtk4-builder-tool simplify --3to4. The “hardest” part was moving from GtkFileChooserButton to GtkButton + GtkFileChooserNative.
I’ll probably reimplement everything cleanly from scratch (current UI files were generated with Glade) when libadwaita becomes available.
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