[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#750910: Bug#757308: grass: Please update to use wxpython3.0

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Olly,

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 08:07:09AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 07, 2014 at 03:46:15PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > just a metacomment:  Due to the wxPython issue several packages get RC
> > bugs filed which in several cases leads to the fact that these are
> > simply removed from testing and either create a lot of work or will be
> > lost for the Jessie release.
> 
> All the bugs I've filed for the wxpython3.0 transition are currently
> severity important (as recommended here:
> https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam/Transitions), which means
> none are RC.

Ahh, sorry.  I considered them RC as well.

> I've just looked through the packages which have been auto-removed so
> far, and most of these bugs have had no response from the maintainer
> (even when I've included a patch - e.g. #749870 and #751552), or the
> maintainer has explicitly been OK with the package being removed from
> testing.

Uhmmm, good we talked about this.  I think time is ripe to team hijack
ctsim.  Kevin M. Rosenberg is MIA / unresponsive regarding Debian Med
team maintenance offers since a long time.  So he was warned.  I'll care
about ctsim (#751552) in the next couple of days.
 
> It seems to me the big issue here is really that we have a lot of
> maintainers who don't respond to bugs in their packages.

I perfectly agree that this is the most frustrating issue for
migrations.
 
> I'm intending to do a pass over the packages which are still using
> wxwidgets2.8 and try to get as many as possible moved over.  My aim
> here is to migrate Debian to wxwidgets3.0 rather than to remove any
> package that stands in the way of removing wxwidgets2.8.

Thanks for your intense work on this.  That's really welcome.

> If you're alluding to #750910 particularly, the issue there was that
> there's a significantly newer upstream version, and so trying to port
> the current package to wx3 seemed a bad approach.  You'd indicated
> that the maintainers were going to look at updating, so I left it at
> that.

I did not had this particular bug in mind (even if we need to care for
it in Debian Med team - to bad that the people who touched the package
before did not responded yet).  When I wrote my last mail I had this
problem of gnumed-client[1] in mind.

> > IMHO this is bad timing to get a predependency for several
> > applications removed quite close to a release date.
> 
> I left wxpython3.0 until later because it released a few months after
> wxwidgets3.0, and I expect fewer problems (e.g. the Unicode handling
> changes cause FTBFS for some C++ applications, but aren't a problem
> for Python apps).  The packages I've looked at so far seem to mostly
> bear this out.
> 
> I would certainly rather have started the wxpython3.0 work sooner, but
> I'm the only active wx maintainer in recent times (though Gianfranco
> Costamagna has started to get involved recently), and I've been busy
> with the wxwidgets3.0 transition - there's only so much I can do at
> once.

That's fine.  I hope my mail was not sounding to frustrated (I guess you
get a lot of unfriendly response and I did not wanted to add to this
set, really).  Your work id really appreciated.  May be you could ask
for some help on wxpython3.0 on some relevant lists to also get this one
in right in time?

> But that's also the reason why we need to try to eliminate wxwidgets2.8
> from jessie - I just don't have the time to maintain packages of such
> a large upstream project which the upstream maintainers are no longer
> interested in.

+1

> Nobody else in Debian seems interested in actually
> helping to maintain 2.8, and the alternative is to have unmaintained
> packages of such a large, complex and widely used piece of software.

Luckily I managed to upload treeviewx yesterday and I will have a look
into ctsim and sitplus soon.  Hope this will help your effort.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=707341#36 

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