[Freewx-maint] Bug#613431: RFP: wxWidgets Cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 09:32:07PM +0100, Emil Langrock wrote:
> New version of software or new software appears on the horizon which uses 
> wxwidget 2.9 only functionality. These software could be uploaded to 
> experimental, but Debian doesn't provide this version at all.

Unfortunately 2.9 is a development release series and has no guarantees
of API stability, which means it's not terribly suitable for packaging.
Every point release (e.g. 2.9.2 to 2.9.3) would be like trying to
move the archive from 2.6 to 2.8, which is just unfeasible given the
number of reverse dependencies of wx.

So this will probably need to wait until it matures and becomes 3.0.x.
Latest word I've seen is "3.0 will probably happen in the beginning of
the next year rather than in this one" at:

http://wxwidgets.blogspot.com/2011/07/292-and-plans-for-future.html

However the "huge amounts of the new code that will hopefully be in
2.9.3" makes me wonder if the start of 2012 is a realistic target.

It's rather unhelpful for upstream to be encouraging new projects to
require wx 2.9, when it isn't ABI or even API stable, but that's the
situation.

Cheers,
    Olly