Bug#826374: mate-desktop: Provide an alternative GTK2 build of MATE

[Tom Maneiro]

Package: mate-desktop
Version: 1.14.1-1
Severity: wishlist

Recently MATE 1.14 landed on Testing, which brought to the table a change of
massive importance: the switch to GTK3 from GTK2. While this was a expected
change, clearly outlined at upstream's roadmap (it's basically their only
choice if they want to support Wayland), for some users dealing with constant
(and INTENTIONAL) breakages at GTK3 upstream (themes being the #1 offender,
among other things) it's an undesired and uncomfortable change for such users
(including myself). For now I don't really care about Wayland support (not that
I don't want it, but right now it isn't a priority for my specific needs).
Dealing with such upstream issues at GTK3 is annoying to the point of making
MATE unusable for some of us!

Fortunately MATE doesn't intend to drop GTK2 support yet, and 1.14 can still be
built against GTK2. Checking other distros, there are PPAs for Ubuntu (albeit
aimed at older LTS releases), but obviously we need a Debian-specific
alternative. What I suggest is having both flavors of MATE (GTK2 and GTK3)
available, at least for a while. Obviously you can't have both installed at the
same time, so you can choose between GTK versions and the packages will take
care of the rest.

Really, I love MATE to the point of it being my DE of choice for Linux, and I'm
using it across all of my desktop Debian installs, but the switch to GTK3 have
made me reconsider my choice of desktop, as I'm tired of dealing with the
obvious disconnect among GTK3 developers with its real-world users.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.5.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=es_VE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=es_VE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages mate-desktop depends on:
ii  hicolor-icon-theme        0.15-1
ii  libatk1.0-0               2.20.0-1
ii  libc6                     2.22-9
ii  libcairo-gobject2         1.14.6-1+b1
ii  libcairo2                 1.14.6-1+b1
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0        2.34.0-1
ii  libglib2.0-0              2.48.1-1
ii  libgtk-3-0                3.20.5-4
ii  libmate-desktop-2-17      1.14.1-1
ii  libpango-1.0-0            1.40.1-1
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0       1.40.1-1
ii  libstartup-notification0  0.12-4
ii  libxrandr2                2:1.5.0-1
ii  mate-desktop-common       1.14.1-1
ii  mate-user-guide           1.14.0-1
ii  python                    2.7.11-1
ii  python-requests           2.10.0-1

mate-desktop recommends no packages.

mate-desktop suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information