Audacity 2.0.6-2 several GUI problems due to wxWidgets 3.x

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 12:47 PM Peter P. <peterparker at fastmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> thanks for maintaining and developing the audacity package!
>
> I am on Debian/testing and just upgraded to audacity version 2.0.6
> using apt. I just noticed two new problems:
>
> 1.)
> The 'device bar' is suddenly empty, regardless of used audio backend
> (alsa/jack) it only shows the loudspeaker and microphone images, but no
> drop-down menu of audio driver system and available record and playback
> devices. The audio devices are recognized correctly in the
> Preferences/Devices, it is merely the 'device bar' toolbar that is
> empty.
>
> 2.)
> When opening files from the command line, eg
>         audacity somefile.wav
> the zoom level is not adjusted to "fit project" right after opening the
> file, but a very long timeline from -24hours to more than 216hours is
> displayed (and the imported waveform being literally invisible) and the
> user has to click "Fit Project" in order to see the waveform.
> This does not occur when opening files from the open dialog in the
> file menu.
> There are no extra messags posted on the command line when the error
> occurs.
>
> Both errors might be due to audacity being compiled against wxWidgets 3.x
> ttp://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Incorrect_wxWidgets_Version
> It seems the audacity team is still trying to catch up with 3.x which in
> itself might be in a flux. So although audacity compiles against 3.x it
> is not really useable for end-users such as me. I have reported this to
> the audacity devels as well, but for now it seems to be of more help to
> debian users to stick to compiling the package against the older version
> of wxWidgets I think.
>
> The oldstable package of version 2.0.1-1 therefore works well.
>
> How can I further help here?
>

This has already been reported as
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=781866. Unfortunately,
the situation seems rather complicated.

The problem at hand is that in Debian, the wxwidgets maintainers are in the
process of phasing out wxwidgets 2.8. Please see
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=749659 for the activity
that lead Debian compiling against wxwidgets 3.0. Also, please not that
wxwidgets is not included in jessie at all, see
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/WxWidgets/Transition2.8to3.0, and it is also
scheduled to be removed from unstable.

This means that going back to wxwidgets 2.8 is not an option.   I'm
therefore closing #781866 with this email. Still, it seems that audacity
provides a poor user experience with wxwidgets 3.0, and judging from
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Incorrect_wxWidgets_Version, there is
still a lot of work to do here. I would recommend to direct feedback,
comments, and ideally patches, to the audacity developers.

Sorry.

Best,
Reinhard
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