[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#911167: GTK2 support will reach EOL in Debian in the near future (Was: Bug#911167: gwyddion: Depend on gtksourceview2)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi David,

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 12:33:46AM +0200, David Nečas (Yeti) wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 10:18:59PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > Hi David and Petr,
> > 
> > as you can see below, we can not ship gwyddion - at least not in its
> > current form with GUI if it will stick to GTK-2+ toolkit.  Do you
> > see any chance to port it to GTK-3+?
> 
> There is no way to port to GTK+3 without breaking backward
> compatibility.  We value backward compatibility.

I might be naive but to my perception the term "backward compatibility"
is misplaced if it is about GUI design issues.

> Some time not that long ago Debian was *the* distribution which supported
> the widest range of software.  Now you are removing GTK+2 when Fedora
> still offers GTK+1?

I'm not sure whether my general statement about GTK-2+ is true in any
case it concerns gtksourceview2.
 
> This is bat shit crazy.  There will be probably GTK+5 released before we
> would be able to port to GTK+3.  GTK+2 is *the* *stable* *version*.  No
> one who does actual software development can afford to spend 3/4 of time
> and effort constantly porting to some new GTK+ nonsense and deal with
> neverending deprecations.
> 
> If Debian does not support GTK+2 we will have to tell users to avoid it.

Just a short note:  I once volunteered to take over the maintenance of
gwyddion in Debian since the former maintainer had no time to do this
any more.  As long as it is about technical issues and my work is
respected I'm fine to spent a share of my limited time resources on this
packaging.  I have no time to discuss some developers personal opinion
about toolkit stabilities or distribution choices.  Feel free to ping me
in case gwyddion might build on more recent toolkits to review the
packaging.

Thank you

        Andreas.

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