[Freewx-maint] Bug#762062: wxwidgets2.8: Should not be included in jessie

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Thu Sep 18 03:28:58 UTC 2014


Source: wxwidgets2.8
Version: 2.8.12.1+dfsg2-2
Severity: serious
Justification: In the package maintainer's opinion this package is unsuitable for release

We should not release jessie with wxwidgets2.8.

We have packages of wxwidgets3.0 and wxpython3.0 which are newer
upstream releases of the software in wxwidgets2.8, and most of the
reverse dependencies have already been migrated - by the release freeze
for jessie, we should be down to a very small number of reverse
dependencies unmigrated, most of which we have agreement to remove.

The wxWidgets library is a large and complex piece of software, and
2.8.x is unmaintained upstream.  Even before 3.0 was released, 2.8 was
neglected - the last release was 2.8.12 on 2011-03-28.  By the time
jessie releases, this release will be close to 4 years old.  By the EOL
of jessie (assuming no LTS), it'll be almost 7 years old.

The wx maintainer team in Debian is not a strong one - I've been the
only active member in recent times, though Gianfranco Costamagna has
started to get involved more recently.  Neither of us are interested
in continuing to maintain wxwidgets2.8.

Meanwhile, upstream are currently working towards a new stable release
series, with 3.2.0 slated to be released "in the beginning of 2015" -
source: http://trac.wxwidgets.org/wiki/Roadmap

Historically, upstream's prediction of release dates have tended to be
rather optimistic, but even if they're off by a whole year, we'll still
have a new upstream release series in the lifetime of jessie, which
means some applications will be wanting wxwidgets3.2 packaged in
jessie+1 because they rely on new features added in it.  And we really
don't want to be trying to maintain packages of three different upstream
releases of wx concurrently.

Cheers,
    Olly



More information about the Freewx-maint mailing list