Hello GNOME team,
The FTP Team are starting to see removal requests for packages which
use GTK2 and are unlikely to be ported to GTK3, but are not RC-buggy.
Examples are #968204 and #968283.
I read your bug report against one of those two packages and smcv writes
GTK 2 is used by some important productivity applications like GIMP,
and has also historically been a popular UI toolkit for proprietary
software that we can't change, so perhaps removing GTK 2 from Debian
will never be feasible. However, it has reached the point where a
dependency on it is a bug - not a release-critical bug, and not a
bug that can necessarily be fixed quickly, but a piece of technical
debt that maintainers should be aware of.
My interpretation of this is that use of GTK2 is not really grounds for
removal by itself, because there is no removal of GTK2 planned for the
time being. So maintainers who don't want to deal with a package which
is not likely to be updated for newer versions of GTK (which is fair
enough) should orphan rather than request removal.
I wanted to ask whether you agree with me about this.
--
Sean Whitton
