Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] gtk/gtk2/gtk3 USE flag situation

[NP-Hardass]

On 05/27/2016 10:21 AM, Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Despite it being 2016 and gtk2 pretty much dead, buried and forgotten
> upstream, many applications still support only gtk2, have subtle issues
> with their gtk3 port, or support both, with some of our userbase
> clinging to gtk2 for dubious political or aesthetical reasons.
>
> For the latter cases, despite GNOME teams policy and strong preference
> on not providing a choice and just choosing gtk2 or gtk3 (gtk3 if it's
> working as good as gtk2), some cases exist where the maintainers want
> to provide such choice. In some cases it is understandable for a short
> while during transition, e.g firefox. In other cases, it is purely for
> the sake of providing the choice of working with a deprecated toolkit,
> apparently.
>
> My highly biased essay aside, we need to finally globally agree on what
> we do in this situation. If we allow this choice at all, only for
> special cases, or widespread. And if this choice is provided, how do we
> name the USE flag.
>
I don't see the benefit of forcing people off of gtk2 to gtk3 when gtk2
is working just fine.  gtk2 is entrenched, and will take a while to
migrate apps from.  A parallel, why don't we just drop python2.7?  It's
old, superseded, and plenty of things support python3.x.  I disagree
with this logic.  In my opinion, we should remove support for them when
it seems that it has been dropped by a majority of packages or unfixed
security issues make it not worth keeping around.  I don't think we are
anywhere near that point.

[...]

> Thoughts? Agreements? Suggestions?
> I'm particularly interested in QA opinion here. I believe WilliamH
> wanted to spearhead this from their side.
>
>
> Regards,
> Mart Raudsepp
> Gentoo developer, GNOME team
>

Flag specific comments to follow in WilliamH's reply.

-- 
NP-Hardass