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.
The correct mechanism for the GNOME team to stop maintaining GTK2 is to
orphan it, and to do so sooner rather than later, to give any others who
may wish to pick it up the most time to do so and work through
transitional problems, well ahead of the next release freeze.
This is perhaps the best place to start asking: who (else) is interested
in picking up GTK2?
--
👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ [email protected]
🔗 https://jmtd.net
