[Freewx-maint] Bug#644571: uses libgnomeprint which is scheduled for removal

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 12:25:03AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 04:44:59PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Am 10.10.2011 12:53, schrieb Olly Betts:
> > > Do you have an approximate timeline for the removal of libgnomeprint?
> > 
> > The plan was to remove it for squeeze already and we definitely want
> > to resp.  are going to remove it for wheezy. That leaves around 6-7
> > months of development time until the prospective freeze starts. So we
> > should definitely start any efforts as early as possible.
> 
> OK.  I think if the internal code proves problematic I'll look at the
> feasibility of trying to backport the gtkprint code to 2.8 

I have looked at this, and it looks quite involved as there have been
a number of code clean-ups in the wx code between 2.8 and 2.9.

I sent a mail to the wx packagers list a few hours ago to see if anybody
else has done this work already.  It seems likely some other distros have
hit these issues too.  I've also asked if they have a better idea of when
3.0 is likely to appear.  If it's early enough next year, we could perhaps
check which wx dependent packages actually have printing support and focus
on moving those to 3.0.

Failing a patch appearing and fixing everything for us, or 3.0 getting
released soon, I'm wondering if it might be less work and less risk of
breaking things for me to adopt libgnomeprintui and any dependencies for
wheezy.  It's at least a constrained reprieve for them, as we know wx 3.0
will have GtkPrint support.  Are these libraries actually problematic to
keep around, or is it rather than the pkg-gnome team don't have the
resources to keep obsolete libraries around?

> > What are the plans regarding getting packages updated to 2.8 and
> > removing 2.6?

Some good news - 2.6 was removed from unstable yesterday, and so should be
gone from testing too in 10 days, unless something RC pops up in a
dependent package.  So progress there at least, and one less thing needing
my time.

Cheers,
    Olly