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
