Re: Call to maintainers: GNOME 2.31 to ship GTK 2.90

[Sebastien Bacher <seb128 ubuntu com>]

Le samedi 12 juin 2010 à 17:31 +0200, Xavier Claessens a écrit :
> Ubuntu told me that Maverick (the next ubuntu release) is not going
> to 
> ship GTK3, and if we can't build Empathy with GTK2 then they'll just 
> keep Empathy 2.30.x... tbh I think that's a bad decision from Ubuntu, 
> but it would be really sad to not ship the latest empathy...

Hi,

It's not that easy. The Ubuntu team does think GNOME3 is moving in the
right direction and that GTK3 will be great and wants to help to get
there. In the same time we need to ship in octobre something solid our
users rely on. We did discuss it a lot and the distribution might be
quite popular our team is still quite small with limited manpower, the
GTK3 transition will require quite some packaging work to build GTK3
versions of all those libraries and our one CD constraint will make
challenging to ship 2 versions of the GTK stack. 
Realistically we aim at doing the packaging work and getting GTK3 in
shape and in main this cycle but not in the default installation, we
have planned the GNOME3 transition for Ubuntu over 2 cycles.

> But I guess if the whole GNOME 2.32 depends on GTK3 then they'll
> change their mind. 

No, we will just ship what we have now and keep working over 2 cycles on
the GNOME3 update.

One side note is that lot of users out there are on stable distributions
versions which don't have GTK. Those distributions will not change for a
while and those users will stay there. Now softwares writers have the
choice to stop targeting those users and stop allowing GTK2 builds of
their code or to allow building with either GTK2 and GTK3. 
I guess lot of upstreams out of GNOME will keep supporting GTK2 for some
years which is a reasonable position, what matters for most upstream is
to have their code used. I doubt that for example firefox or openoffice
will drop support for GTK2 builds any time. I don't think because a
software is part of GNOME means it should hard require GTK3 now and stop
building on GTK2, it should rather be a maintainer decision on what they
want for their software and users.


Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher