MBF proposal: remaining users of fltk1.1 (vs. fltk1.3).

[ucko@debian.org (Aaron M. Ucko)]

Debian has had two versions of the FLTK GUI toolkit with nearly
identical APIs for over nine years: 1.1 and 1.3.  The only breaking
change in the 1.3 series is that it expects text to be in UTF-8 rather
than legacy national encodings, which Debian has generally deprecated
for quite some time; meanwhile, 1.1 is thoroughly dead upstream.

As such, I would like to try to drop 1.1, or at least its development
package, in time for bullseye.  (I know it's relatively late in the
cycle, but the necessary changes should generally be minimal.)

I see 19 source packages that still make use of 1.1, as listed at the
end of this message.  I can and will take care of packages belonging to
the QA Group (epm and htmldoc) and Science Team (imview) myself, but
propose to file bugs against the remaining 16, via a template along the
lines of

  Subject: #PACKAGE#: Please migrate to FLTK 1.3

  #PACKAGE# still builds against FLTK 1.1, for which it is long past
  time for Debian to drop support.  Please migrate to 1.3, which is
  generally as simple as adjusting #PACKAGE#'s build dependencies and
  ensuring that it uses UTF-8 rather than a legacy text encoding.  (That
  said, please also make sure that you're linking FLTK dynamically,
  e.g. via fltk-config --ldflags rather than fltk-config --ilbs.)

  For more details, please see the debian-devel thread starting at
  https://lists.debian.org/...

  Thanks!

Please let me know if you have any concerns, or if I should additionally
file a bug or two against lintian to catch the use of FLTK 1.1 and/or
static FLTK linkage.  (I haven't swept for the latter among packages
using 1.3, but I do see that several packages build-depend on 1.1 but
have no corresponding runtime dependencies.)

Also, please keep me copied on replies.

Thanks!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Debian ACE maintainers <team+ace@tracker.debian.org>
   ace

Debian ALSA Maintainers <pkg-alsa-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   alsa-tools

Debian Go Packaging Team <pkg-go-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   golang-github-yosssi-ace

Debian Multimedia Maintainers <debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org>
   csound

Debian Multimedia Maintainers <pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   horgand
   paulstretch

Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org>
   htmldoc

Debian Science Maintainers <debian-science-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   imview

Debichem Team <debichem-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
   drawxtl

Marcelo Soares Mota <motasmarcelo@gmail.com>
   posterazor

Paul Brossier <piem@debian.org>
   aconnectgui
   alsamixergui

Peter Pentchev <roam@debian.org>
   wmanager

Thierry Randrianiriana <randrianiriana@gmail.com>
   xdiskusage

Tiago Bortoletto Vaz <tiago@debian.org>
   rakarrack

-- 
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC (amu at alum.mit.edu, ucko at debian.org)
http://www.mit.edu/~amu/ | http://stuff.mit.edu/cgi/finger/?amu@monk.mit.edu