Retire glib and gtk+ 1.2 from rawhide?

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:17:39PM +0800, Chen Lei wrote:
> >
> Most of  those applications are replaced, e.g. xmms2 for xmms, putty(svn)
> for putty 0.60, 
> since it's already done by some other distributions, I think
> it's quite safe to retire gtk 1.2 completely from fedora. 

That's not a good argument. Fedora packager may have other need and wants
than other distribution packagers.

> Also, considering
> fedora is a bleeding-edge distribution, keeping some many old applications
> with dead upstream for a long time seems strange.

If they work well and there is no known bugs, it is not strange to keep
old applications with dead upstream. As long as there is a maintainer who
fixes bug in due time, it is, in my opinion, good for Fedora to keep 
packages with dead upstreams.

Now I agree that it would be better if no application in fedora used 
libraries with dead upstreams that have replacements, as it is the case 
for gtk+. I think that it is the path you should follow: help all the 
maintainers of packages depending on gtk+ to transition to a newer
widget library. Or persuade them to let another package obsolete their
package. However, if some packagers are still convinced that their 
package is worth maintaining (and they do it right) and upstream is not 
willing to switch to Gtk2, I think that the best course of action is to 
keep those packages in Fedora.


For the applications I know some comments
* I am quite sure that gmanedit is not a manedit evolution. However, manedit
  is orphaned right now (though still not purged).
* xdialog is build twice, once agains gtk+ and then against Gtk2. I think 
  it would be nice to keep it that way, though you could also convince the 
  current maintainer to keep only the Gtk2 stuff. also xdialog seems to be 
  pretty dead upstream too, though I still haven't seen a perfect
  substitute (zenity is close, but not compatible).


There are no open bugs against gtk+ which is, in my opinion in favor
of keeping it. One point against gtk+ is the lack of utf8 support. I don't
know if there are other noteworthy differences.

-- 
Pat