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

[William Hubbs]

On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 05:21:06PM +0300, 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.

(qa hat in place)

There is a qa policy about this. All packages in the tree should
move away from the non-versioned gtk use flag to versioned use flags,
like the ones the qt team uses [1] [2].

This seems to be the best compromise. It allows the maintainers of the
packages to decide which toolkit they want to support. If there is too
much work involved in maintaining a package with dual support, don't do
the work, just make it support the appropriate toolkit version.

I have not seen any reason why something like this couldn't work. After
all, it seems to work for the qt team.

William

[1]
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Quality_Assurance/Policies#gtk.2Fgtk2.2Fgtk3_USE_flag_situation
[2]
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Quality_Assurance/Meeting_Summaries#GTK_flag_situation