[Aptitude-devel] Plans for future major versions (0.8?)

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi,

This will not happen immediately, but I was planning to remove GTK+ and
Qt back-ends at some point, not in point releases but in the next
"major" version or so.

We don't even know if the code compiles today, and it's generally a
burden when one has to do mechanical modifications (e.g. C++/boost
related changes in the last few months) or simply grep for places that
might be affected by some bug or contain some piece of code.

Qt was never enabled and only worked on as part of a GSoC project in
~2010.  A bit more development went into the GTK+ front-end, and it was
enabled at some point, but it got disabled in 2012 because it was
seriously buggy, and nobody complained since.


Additionally, according to the maintainers, Qt4 is going to be removed
at some point before the next stable (~1 year at most), and porting for
Qt5 is needed.

Similarly, I am not sure about GTK+, but I have heard that GTK+3 was
incompatible with v2 (and some projects like LXDE decided to migrate to
Qt instead of porting to v3), and it is unmaintained upstream (maybe
Cinnamon maintains that now?).  And even if v2 will maybe stay in the
archive for longer time, I guess that at some point it would be removed
as well.


In short, these projects have been dead for longer time than the period
when they were alive/active, and they are a moderate hassle to keep
around and are/will become obsolete soon, if they are not already.

So I do not expect that the removal is controversial, but this is a
heads-up just in case.

They can always be disinterred from VCS if needed, in any case.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>