Bug#912860: Don't ship libgtk2-perl in Bullseye

[intrigeri at debian.org]

Source: libgtk2-perl
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: jbicha at debian.org
User: debian-perl at lists.debian.org
Usertags: gtk2-removal
User: pkg-gnome-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: oldlibs

The Debian GNOME Maintainers are working to reduce GTK+ 2 usage in
Debian. GTK+ 3 has been declared stable with its 3.22 release in
September 2016. Bullseye will likely be frozen early 2021, which will
already have given upstream authors more than four years to migrate.

The GTK+ 2 bindings for Perl are stable but nobody is actively working
on them: the last time significant fixes were committed upstream was
in 2015 and nobody is following up on the bug reports anymore. So I'd
be uncomfortable seeing us commit to support this stack until mid-2024
(likely end of Bullseye security support), let alone mid-2016 (LTS).

Therefore, I intend to remove libgtk2-perl from testing soon after the
Buster release, and then from sid later during the Bullseye
development cycle. I'll file bug reports soonish against all
reverse-dependencies so their maintainers have a couple years to find
a solution.

I've personally ported a couple Perl GTK+ apps from 2.x to 3.x and
it's mostly straightforward. Upstream for libgtk3-perl and
libglib-object-introspection-perl is responsive and happy to add any
bits that may be missing.

If critical bits of Debian still depend on libgtk2-perl (d-i?),
please let me know :)

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri