On Sunday 07 December 2008 16:10:34 Charles Plessy wrote: > With its thousands of packages, Debian is not so rich in manpower, so if > the current maintainers of GTK+ 1.2 want to abandon it and the QA team is > not interested in keeping it, there is no other choice than to adopt it > (and its 43 bugs) if you want it to stay in Debian. It had less than upload > per year since 2003, so maybe it is doable. Also, I think that it is > possible to opt-out security support if this an issue (but it might make > the package unfit for release).
I must admit I was under the impression from this discussion that GTK+ 1.2 was simply _unwanted_ in Debian due to reasons of out-of-dateness and possible security problems... I am quite willing to adopt the package and maintain it, but I couldn't find it on the list of orphans. Maybe I didn't look hard enough? That list is enormous... :-( On a side note, I already am attempting to adopt a companion for GTK+ 1.2, namely gktglarea [1]. The modified package is on mentors and I am looking for a sponsor [2] (nudge nudge :-)) > In our experience with GAMGI (http://www.gamgi.org/), GTK+ 1.2 was indeed > useful to prepare a preliminary package that helped to convince Upstream to > GTK 2.0. Good point! But as an illustration to my point, let me quote from a forum message by the GAMGI author before he decided to make the transition. His statements are representative of the problems of many scientific programmers, who typically distribute their programs themselves: > I am the first author of GAMGI (http://www.gamgi.org/), which depends on > Mesa, Expat, Freetype 2, Glib 1, Gtk 1, Gtkglarea1, that's why I am so keen > about compiling these libraries myself. > > Glib 1, Gtk 1 and Gtkglarea1 are considered obsolete and becoming more and > more difficult to get from Linux distributions (by the way, GtkGlarea 2 is > an old library that works with Gtk 2.*, not Gtk 1.2.10, replaced by > Gtkglext, the new way to bridge Gtk 2.* and Mesa code) and until I change > to Gtk 2 or 3 (which is not trivial, as Gamgi has now in excess of 200,000 > lines of C code), I need to get them to work, not just to me but to my > users as well. Currently I am distributing these pre-compiled libraries > (.so and .h files) for x86, xf86_64 and ppc architectures, but to feel in > control I need to be able to compile these libraries myself, as I always > did in the past. I usually have several different versions of mesa, expat, > etc. installed simultaneously, for testing purposes, etc. Cheers, Morten [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=471986 [2] http://tinyurl.com/6f7f57 -- Morten Kjeldgaard, asc. professor, MSc, PhD BiRC - Bioinformatics Research Center, Aarhus University C. F. Møllers Alle, Building 1110, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Lab +45 8942 3130 * Fax +45 8942 3077 * Home +45 8618 8180 Mobile +45 5186 0147 * http://www.bioxray.au.dk/~mok -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
