Source: pcb Severity: minor
Dear Maintainer, gtk2 is likely to be removed from Debian in the not too far future, #947713. I am following the development of pcb, and I don't think the project has the resources for porting to gtk3 or gtk4 (there are hardly any commits these days at all). Which means a gtk2 removal would force users to use pcb-lesstif, which doesn't differ only in the GUI toolkit but offers reduced GUI functionality (less widgets, less dialog boxes). Or it would force users to switch to another layout editor. Meanwhile pcb-rnd, which once started as a fork of pcb, runs fine with gtk4 with latest librnd (already available in Debian sid). pcb-rnd can read and write all native file formats of pcb. It has changed and progressed a lot since the original fork, but the basic concepts and the GUI are still somewhat similar to pcb's so pcb users would find it more familiar than e.g. KiCad. If gtk2 is phased out and pcb won't provide a gtk3/gtk4 HID by then, pcb users will either need to "downgrade" to pcb-lesstif or "upgrade" to pcb-rnd or learn a totally different branch of EDA from scratch. For anyone who installs pcb-gtk, it may be easy to find pcb-lesstif, but it may be less trivial to find pcb-rnd as a "natural upgrade path". Thus I propose pcb-gtk could Suggest pcb-rnd. This would help users learn about pcb-rnd as a natural alternative to pcb-gtk, before they are forced to change their habits, may pcb fail to port to gtk3/gtk4 in time. -- System Information: Distributor ID: Devuan Description: Devuan GNU/Linux 3 (beowulf) Release: 3 Codename: beowulf Architecture: x86_64 Kernel: Linux 5.13.2i5 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)
