Proposal: retire lesstif in f24 and beyond

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 07:20:22AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 10/09/2015 09:17 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >On 8 October 2015 at 17:04, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> >>Christopher Meng wrote:
> >>>IMO motif should 'Obsoletes' lesstif in Fedora since motif is free now.
> >>
> >>The reason we kept lesstif even after OpenMotif was finally freed is because
> >>OpenMotif only implements the Motif 2 API, whereas lesstif implemented the
> >>Motif 1 API. Back then, a lot of Motif applications did not compile with
> >>Motif 2.
> >>
> >
> >A lot of applications still do not mainly because by the time
> >OpenMotif was out.. "Motif" was dead except for legacy computer code
> >that a lot of research institutes still use. It looks from the amount
> >of porting that has been done in this thread that a lot of those
> >problems are easier to fix now?
> >
> > From the people who did the porting was it a quick fix or a bunch of patches?
> 
> As far as the packages I touched are concerned, the "porting effort"
> was very low.
> 
> The effort basically was reflecting the packaging dep-naming changes
> into the specs.
> 
> I did not have to apply any changes to the packages' source code. My
> guess is, on the code-level, today's "Motif" is sufficiently
> backward compatible, the packages already saw testing against Motif
> or even been developed on Motif (and then ported to lesstif)[1]. I
> point, I which makes me wonder, is Fedora seemingly being late in
> the switch to Motif in comparison to other distros.
> 
> A problem hiding is package installation conflicts between the
> *-devel package of different versions of the lesstif, openmotif and
> motif packages. Therefore, I tried to stay with lesstif on fedora <
> 24 and switch to motif only on fedora >= 24.
> 
> I know, we are late in the release schedule, but I am considering to
> switching at least Inventor to motif on fc23, as well - It's
> unimportant enough to most users, but is important to me ;)

I think that in a case of leaf package like that it totally makes
sense to switch even this late before release. Removal of
a dependency on lesstif seems important enough.

Zbyszek