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

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 08:44:45AM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> On 06.12.2011 10:04, Olly Betts wrote:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> It's basically libgnomeprint, libgnomeprintui and libgnomecups.
> As GNOME has moved away from those libs and no current GNOME
> applications use them anymore I think no one in the Debian GNOME team is
> actively using and testing them anymore. At least I myself have removed
> them quite some time ago. And maintaining a package which you don't use
> is obviously not ideal.
> As upstream stopped development, the maintenance is basically a
> downstream responsibility now.
> It's not that those three libs did take a vast amount of time in the
> past, but rather no-one in the GNOME team wants to keep this dead code
> around and be responsible for it.

Sure, I completely understand.

I will double-check what the dependency tree looks like, but unless
there's some big issue (or someone backports GtkPrint support to wx
2.8), I think I'll just adopt these dependencies with the clear
intention of removing them in wheezy+1.  At least a dead upstream
reduces the rate at which new bugs can get introduced.

It would be good to reduce the number of other packages depending on
libgnomeprintui still.

Cheers,
    Olly