Re: MBF: Removal of GTK2 from forky

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@debian.org>]

Hi,

On 09/01/2026 10:13, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> Hi Jeremy,
>
> On Thu Jan 8, 2026 at 8:38 PM GMT, Jeremy Bícha wrote:
> > GTK 2 has been unmaintained upstream since the end of 2020 when GTK 4
> > was released. There isn't anyone to maintain GTK 2. The Debian GNOME
> > team is trying to remove GTK 2 from Debian, not orphan it.
>
> Thanks for clarifying your intent!
>
> As volunteers, we should only work on what we want to, so the GNOME team
> should absolutely not be compelled to maintain GTK2 if you no longer
> want to.
>
> I respect your opinion that Debian would be better off without GTK2 in
> the archive. However, I don't agree with it. The two pillars of my
> position are: removing this forces the removal of useful dependent
> programs in the archive which have active users; it also makes it more
> difficult for users to run dependent programs *outside* the archive,
> including software of historical significance. IMHO this fall foul of SC
> §4.

(with my Release Team hat on)

If GTK+2 is dead upstream for so long, then it'd be a disservice to our users to 
keep shipping it in new releases. If you find any of the remaining rdeps useful, 
there's time to port those over to GTK+3 or GTK+4.

As for running external software, as you say, that is external, so GTK+2 can be 
shipped externally as well if needed.

We don't ship every old library just because someone could make use of it. There 
is a maintenance cost to that. See e.g. QT4, libsdl1.2 and so many others that 
could been have kept for similar reasons. Perhaps those old packages also need 
us to ship GCC 5 or an old cmake. That's a slippery slope.

Note that GTK+3 was released in 2011.

Cheers,
Emilio