On 27/05/16 16:40, William Hubbs wrote:
> 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
Having read the QA policies, surely the route forwards is fairly obvious
thus:-

- gtk is deprecated and discouraged for any new ebuilds
- we add a QA check to repoman to ensure that the 'gtk' use flag is not
used in any new ebuilds
- existing packages using 'gtk' will get updated to use 'gtk2' or 'gkt3'
in the normal cycle

Any edge cases here, or is this something that could be workable?

MJE