Bug#824891: gtk+3.0: latest version breaks external themes

[Ximin Luo]

Michael Biebl:
> Am 20.05.2016 um 22:40 schrieb Ximin Luo:
>> Source: gtk+3.0
>> Version: 3.20.4-1
>> Severity: important
>> Tags: upstream
>>
>> Dear Maintainer,
>>
>> The version currently in sid breaks external themes including those included in
>> gtk3-engines-breeze and gtk3-engines xfce. Downgrading back to 3.18.9-1 [1]
>> solves the problem.
>>
> 
> Please file bug reports against those themes to get them updated for
> Gtk+ 3.20 [1] and report back with the bug numbers. This way we can add
> appropriate versioned breaks against affected themes.
> 
> Thanks,
> Michael
> 
> [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2015/11/20/a-gtk-update/
> 

I've filed bug reports at #824892 and #824893 but I don't think simply declaring Breaks: can be considered as "solving the problem", and you shouldn't mark that as closing this bug.

It's bad behaviour, both from an engineering and a community-friendliness point of view, to break other projects like this. Linux makes a firm commitment to avoid breaking their clients (userspace), and GTK should do the same too.

To quote the blog post - "Oh NO! they’re breaking themes again! Which is certainly one way to look at it, but I think it misses the point a little bit" - no, to think that this "misses the point" is *itself* _missing the point_. Yes software improves and changes, but we don't make these things in an isolated vacuum and there are real consequences outside of our projects. The real consequence here is the time wasted by external themers trying to maintain compatibility.

This breakage is done in the name of saving people's time, but I doubt if this is really true as the code currently stands. Documentation is crucial for time-saving, yet there's been little attention to that.

>From the Debian side, it would be good at least to also maintain 3.18 in the meantime, until other projects in our community have time to adapt. For the time being, I've rebuilt 3.18.9 and uploaded it here, in case anyone else runs into this bug:

https://people.debian.org/~infinity0/apt/pool/main/g/gtk+3.0/

X

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