Gramps 3.4 problem in ubuntu 16.04, maybe GTK related

[ennoborg at gmail.com]

Hello,

I'm a Gramps user, and developer, and for a couple of reasons, I like to stay with GTK+2 based Gramps 3.4. This version works fine on Mint 17.3, and ubuntu versions up to 15.10, but not on Mint 18, or ubuntu 16.04.

In the Gramps 3.4 GUI, which uses PyGTK, I have a tree view for persons, grouped by surname, and in that tree view, I have two problems that may be related to the Python (2.7.11+) and GTK (2.24.30) versions in Mint 18 / ubuntu 16.04.

In that tree view, a GtkTreeView is used with a custom store, which reads data from a BSDDB database. And the 1st problem in that view is, that when I try to expand the last surname in that view, I see a Python exception, index out of bounds. For example, in a two surname tree, with nodes 0 and 1, print output from on_get_iter shows that it is called with a path of value (2,), and that path does not exist, hence the index out of bounds when it tries to access the node list in our store.

The 2nd problem only shows in a larger tree, like with the 8000+ surnames that I have in my database. Then, whenever I try to expand a surname near the end of the alphabet, Gramps will freeze for a couple of seconds before it expands the node. And the prints in on_get_iter then show that it is not just called with the path of the node to be expanded, or rather one node number too high, but that calls start at path (0,), walking the whole tree, until the right node is found. In other words, I see a sort of linear search. This also happens when I change the selected row inside an expanded surname node.

These delays, and the exception, don't show in ubuntu 15.10, where the GTK version is 2.24.28, and Python is 2.7.10, and because the error shows in the GUI, GTK is the 1st piece to suspect. But alas, code differences between .28 and .30, don't give any clues to me, so the real cause may also be Python itself.

I might be able to test this by installing Python 2.7.11 and GTK 2.24.30 into ubuntu 15.10, because that is where things are still OK, and I'm writing here, because I hope that someone can direct me to install both packages from the latest ubuntu repositories, and see what that brings. An alternative would be to build Python 2.7.11 and GTK 2.24.30 from source, and redirect some paths, so that I can test Gramps without affecting other system parts.

Is there any place where I may find help for this?

thank you,

Enno