Hanno Böck wrote: > > "It does mean, however, that GTK 2 has reached the end of its life. > > We will do one final 2.x release in the coming days, and we encourage > > everybody to port their GTK 2 applications to GTK 3 or 4." > > I read that as there will be one more gtk2 release and none after that. > > This seems to imply: > * When there's a security flaw in gtk2 there won't be a fix from > upstream. > * When there's an incompatibility with new infrastructure (e.g. new gcc > version / new glibc / changing API of libraries gtk depends on) there > will be no updates from upstream. > > This means in all those instances maintainers will have to get patches > from somewhere. We'll likely end up with some form of > gtk-2.x-r[largenumber] with a large patchset at some point. > Maintaining that will be an increasing burden. > > No urgency, but a sign to slowly move off gtk2.
Until there's a relevant flaw that will remain unfixed or there is significant incompatibility with infrastructure (recurse my argument) no signs actually exist. Assuming that there will be a significant maintenance burden which affects all uses doesn't seem rational - hence my question. The blog post shouldn't be misunderstood. The intended audience seems to be application developers, encouraging them to port applications, not so much distributions. Distributions quite often overlook that they wield much power, and thus also have much responsibility. Of course, GTK maintainers in Gentoo choose what to work on, and have made many (only?) excellent choices. I'm merely pleading for rational choices based on actual problems. //Peter
