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

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 09:45:19AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 08:07:09AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> > 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.

That's one of those packages which I'm reluctant to NMU as I don't have
suitable test data, and I don't know much about the field they're used
in, so even with suitable test data I'm not sure how well I could test
an updated package.  So I'm particularly glad to see it taken care of.

> > 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.

That's an unfortunate situation, but there just isn't a release of
wxPython which supports Python 3 yet.

However, that's orthogonal to the wxPython 2.8->3.0 transition - if
gnumed-client remained using wxPython 2.8, it would still be stuck in
the same situation.  The essential problem is simply that gnumed-client
has one dependency which is dropping python2 support and another which
doesn't yet have python3 support.

I've not looked at what gnumed-client uses python-uno for, but if it
is just doing document conversion, then LO 4.3 has a "libreofficekit"
API (it was actually in 4.2 as "liblibreoffice", but 4.3 is more solid)
which provides access to document conversion with significantly less
overhead than via uno: https://github.com/xrmx/pylokit

Otherwise, the only short-term solution which I can think of is for
gnumed-client to add a python2 facade to access python3.3-uno, e.g.
serialising function calls over a pipe.  I don't know how feasible that
would be though.

> > 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?

I'd certainly be happy with fewer unfriendly responses, but there
really haven't been a lot.

I have a script in the works to aid with porting to wxPython 3.0 by
updating for a few changes to constant and method names, based on
experience so far and the (sadly rather vague in places) list of changes
upstream provide.  Once that's in a sane state, my plan was to send a
note to appropriate lists.

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

Yes, much appreciated.

Cheers,
    Olly