[Aptitude-devel] Removing GTK+, Qt from the tree [was Re: Bug#537858: aptitude: comments on i18n]

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2014-02-09 12:22 Axel Beckert:
>Hi,
>
>sorry for my silence the past few days. I caught myself a cough (maybe
>at FOSDEM, maybe at work) and sleep a lot currently.

No problem, take care of yourself.


>Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
>
>> > It is clear by now no one is going to update these interfaces.
>
>Yeah, nobody even argued about aptitude-gtk's removal from the package
>builds.

Yes.  I think that after the initial analysis seeing that the most
basic functionality was missing, it was quite clear that nobody could
have been using it, so that explains the lack of complaints.


>> Now that they've been several years inactive, I would prefer to wait
>> until after the next freeze or so.
>
>Since they're not built anyway, where's the relation to the freeze? Or
>do you fear that the removal will be bumpy and cause side effects?
>Can't imagine any besides FTBFS which would be obvious and should be
>quickly fixed.

They are not going to affect the rest of aptitude, no.  For the
relation to the freeze, see below.


>I rather think that the 0.7 bump would be a good place. (Of course it
>could come after the freeze, too.) But I don't care much actually. I'd
>be even ok if we leave it in their. But I do see a that it might ease
>development.

Maybe GTK2 and Qt4 will not even be present in Jessie, or at least I
think that it's very likely that the main "clients" (GNOME and KDE,
GIMP, VLC, etc) will not depend on them.  When that happens, the
libraries GTK2 and Qt4 will remain only in "things that should not be
used, but we don't remove to not have to remove 500 reverse
dependencies from the archives".  I think that this could happen
before the freeze, thus the relation.

That would be a kind of point of no return for the prototypes, even if
we wanted to enable them again, they would not work without
adaptations for the newer versions.  Natural death vs. murder.  So
since this is going to happen during this year, and that there's no
big rush to remove them, I think that we should defer the decision
until then, and give these project their last grace period.


There's a bug report asking for Qt by the way, with no action for ~2
years.  I would be interested (and indeed, that's one of the reasons
that brought me to aptitude), but then there are so many other things
to do...

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=526812


--
Manuel