Re: Packages still depending on GTK+ 1.2
On Sunday 07 December 2008 16:10:34 Charles Plessy wrote:
> With its thousands of packages, Debian is not so rich in manpower, so if
> the current maintainers of GTK+ 1.2 want to abandon it and the QA team is
> not interested in keeping it, there is no other choice than to adopt it
> (and its 43 bugs) if you want it to stay in Debian. It had less than upload
> per year since 2003, so maybe it is doable. Also, I think that it is
> possible to opt-out security support if this an issue (but it might make
> the package unfit for release).
I must admit I was under the impression from this discussion that GTK+
1.2 was
simply _unwanted_ in Debian due to reasons of out-of-dateness and possible
security problems...
I am quite willing to adopt the package and maintain it, but I couldn't
find
it on the list of orphans. Maybe I didn't look hard enough? That list is
enormous... :-(
On a side note, I already am attempting to adopt a companion for GTK+ 1.2,
namely gktglarea [1]. The modified package is on mentors and I am
looking for
a sponsor [2] (nudge nudge :-))
> In our experience with GAMGI (http://www.gamgi.org/), GTK+ 1.2 was indeed
> useful to prepare a preliminary package that helped to convince Upstream to
> GTK 2.0.
Good point! But as an illustration to my point, let me quote from a forum
message by the GAMGI author before he decided to make the transition. His
statements are representative of the problems of many scientific
programmers,
who typically distribute their programs themselves:
> I am the first author of GAMGI (http://www.gamgi.org/), which depends on
> Mesa, Expat, Freetype 2, Glib 1, Gtk 1, Gtkglarea1, that's why I am so keen
> about compiling these libraries myself.
>
> Glib 1, Gtk 1 and Gtkglarea1 are considered obsolete and becoming more and
> more difficult to get from Linux distributions (by the way, GtkGlarea 2 is
> an old library that works with Gtk 2.*, not Gtk 1.2.10, replaced by
> Gtkglext, the new way to bridge Gtk 2.* and Mesa code) and until I change
> to Gtk 2 or 3 (which is not trivial, as Gamgi has now in excess of 200,000
> lines of C code), I need to get them to work, not just to me but to my
> users as well. Currently I am distributing these pre-compiled libraries
> (.so and .h files) for x86, xf86_64 and ppc architectures, but to feel in
> control I need to be able to compile these libraries myself, as I always
> did in the past. I usually have several different versions of mesa, expat,
> etc. installed simultaneously, for testing purposes, etc.
Cheers,
Morten
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=471986
[2] http://tinyurl.com/6f7f57
--
Morten Kjeldgaard, asc. professor, MSc, PhD
BiRC - Bioinformatics Research Center, Aarhus University
C. F. Møllers Alle, Building 1110, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Lab +45 8942 3130 * Fax +45 8942 3077 * Home +45 8618 8180
Mobile +45 5186 0147 * http://www.bioxray.au.dk/~mok
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