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

[Andreas Tille]

Hi David,

thanks a lot for your quick reply.

On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 03:01:45AM +0100, David Nečas (Yeti) wrote:
> 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.

That's probably right but at some point you somehow need to move away
from GTK+2 which will not get endless support.
 
> 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.

>From a distribution point of view bundled third party software is not
really a good idea.  I can not give you any good advise that will solve
the described problem but I just want to mention this. 

Kind regards

      Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de