[gentoo-dev] Re: firefox gtk3 status, danger of gtk2 in-tree deprecation? (was: www-client/chromium gtk3 support)

[Duncan]

Paweł Hajdan, Jr. posted on Wed, 09 Sep 2015 09:20:13 +0200 as excerpted:

> A user asked for optional gtk3 support in www-client/chromium:
> <https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559378>

Talking about browsers and gtk3, I read that binary distros are starting 
to ship firefox built against gtk3, now.

And with that happened, they'll likely be eager to deprecate gtk2, as I 
think firefox was the big hold-out making that impractical.

Which means gentoo will likely eventually follow, since gtk2 viability 
will be dropping at that point.

So what's the gentoo gtk3 firefox status, and when it does go gtk3, how 
long can users expect their other gtk2 apps to continue to be supported, 
if upstream doesn't update to gtk3, due to inactivity or whatever reason?

While I'm at it, what about claws-mail, which I use but which is still 
gtk2 based?

And what about pan (nntp client), which I've been long-term involved with 
upstream on the mailing lists as a "guru user" and kept the list lights 
on when there was effectively no upstream dev, so I happen to know its 
gtk3 status fairly well -- the gtk3 port has long been done and some 
distros even ship it, but we continue to recommend gtk2 because we 
continue to get reports of various gtk3-based pan bugs that "magically" 
disappear when people rebuild with gtk2, that have never been traced much 
further than that, because the recommendation continues to be gtk2 (yes, 
circular reasoning, but...).

And for as long as I've been running pan, nearing a decade and a half 
now, development has always been sporadic, as I said even lacking an 
upstream dev at all, for a few years.  A couple years ago Heinrich 
Mueller adopted it and did a lot of work, adding some features that had 
been on the request list for years, but while he (and Petr Kovar, the 
Gnome rep and website maintainer, but a l10n guy not a dev) still do 
patches, he hasn't done much more than that for a couple years.  So 
realistically, upstream isn't going to be very active in getting those 
gtk3 bugs traced and patched, tho patches will probably be applied if 
distro maintainers develop and submit them.

For the desktop I tend to be more a kde guy (tho I'm not sure I will 
still be with the frameworks5/plasma5 upgrade...), but on these apps, and 
particularly on pan, since I /am/ involved with upstream there, I'm 
concerned about gtk, but am not close enough to the gentoo/gtk team to 
know the status there, thus the questions.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman