[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#885530: gwyddion: Build-Depends on unmaintained pygtk

[David Nečas (Yeti)]

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 11:50:53PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> it would be great if you would consider to migrate gwyddion to GTK+3 /
> Gnome 3.  Otherwise we can not support the packaging for Debian any
> more.

I already considered it – and rejected.  GTK+3 migration is a major
undertaking which
- we do not have the manpower for,
- means breaking our own APIs a lot and thus breaking users' extensions
  and scripts, and
- would be pointless by the time it is finished because GTK+3 will be
  left by the roadside soon.

GTK+ developers currently have some pretty wild ideas about backward
compatibility (releasing new major version every 2 years, breaking API
even between minor versions, ...).  GTK+-related libraries, and
generally anything exposing some kind of API, are going to struggle to
keep up and maintain their own branches for multiple GTK+ versions.  The
resulting compatibility matrix will be an utter mess, with support for
older versions being dropped regularly.

Thefore, for a stable program developer, porting to GTK+3 would open
the Pandora's box of neverending ‘you need to port to never version of
this or that’ while making it very difficult to run the current version
of the program on an older system.  The GTK+ version to target in a
stable program remains to be 2 for the forseeable future.

I will look into bundling pygtk with Gwyddion.  This should hopefully
take a week or a couple to implement – not the same in years.

Best regards,

Yeti