[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#894055: gwyddion: Depends on gconf

[Andreas Tille]

Hi David,

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 10:40:37AM +0200, David Nečas (Yeti) wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 08:38:04AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > Since I guess the issue is not only relevant for Debian but also for
> > other distributions which will probably not provide gconf as well, I'd
> > like to forward the issue to you and hope that the links below will give
> > you sufficient documentation to get rid of gconf in gwyddion.
> 
> Gwyddion does not require GConf; it can be simply compiled without.
> I trust Debian can do that.  GConf was only used to register a
> thumbnailer in some desktop environments.
> 
> So GConf specifically is not a problem.

Thanks for the quick and very helpful hint.  I just upgraded to the latest
upstream version and have droped gconf.

> > gconf's last release was about 5 years ago. It has been replaced by
> > gsettings
> 
> This, however, sends a sad message to developers of software that value
> backward compatibility:  Never depend on anything, nevery use any system
> services, write everything from scratch, embed what you cannot write
> from scratch and do not even think about environment integration.
> 
> Five years is nothing.  Gwyddion has been maintaining backward
> compatibility for a dozen of years – and hope to maintain it for
> another dozen.  Of course it utilises some old technologies.
> 
> Apparently, conservative libraries like FFTW can be trusted, but
> anything GUI related goes to hell after 10 years – and anything related
> to desktop envronments after 3.<sigh>

Unfortunately I can not help much here.  In Debian we try hard to keep
even orphaned software alive as our workload permits.  For instance in
Debian Med we are close to a package count of 1000 packages - assume
about 10-20% of the packages is orphaned by their original authors and
we try hard to adapt the software to current development tools and
libraries.

Apropos compatibility:  With gwyddion you will sooner or later face the
fact that Python 2 will not be supported any more.  I'd recommend to
switch to Python 3 rather sooner than later.

Thanks again for your quick help

      Andreas.

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