[Freewx-maint] Bug#786986: Wxwidgets webview link flags problem

[Olly Betts]

Control: reopen -1
Control: found -1 wxwidgets3.0/3.0.2+dfsg-1

> I think you mean boinc there, and it still is an rdep in both
> unstable/testing.

Sorry, I missed off the "-R" from the dak rm command when checking what
the reverse dependencies were.  As you say boinc still uses webview (but
nothing else currently does).

> >If something else wants them, it'll need to wait until we switch wx to
> >gtk3, which I'm currently hoping to do along with the transition to wx
> >3.2.

> Do you have any ETA for 3.2?

No.  I was expecting it might happen in time for squeeze, but upstream
keep slipping 3.1.0 (the first release in the development series leading
to 3.2), so that's not looking likely now.

I've reinstated the webview packages for now, but they're definitely on
borrowed time as things are, as to keep webview for stretch, wx would
need to switch to gtk3 from what pochu says.

I actually consulted wx upstream about which gtk version to use when
packaging wx3.0 for Debian, and their recommendation at that point was
firmly to stick with gtk2 for now.  That would have been around October
2013.

Checking "git log -i --grep=gtk3" shows 20 GTK3 related commits on the
3.0 branch since then (4 of which are since 3.0.2) so things have
presumably evolved somewhat.  But switching wx to gtk3 won't be a
painfree process - e.g. kicad doesn't work properly with wx3.0 built
with gtk3:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1339539

Breaking kicad and possibly other packages to allow boinc to be built
doesn't seem a sensible move.

That report says Fedora are using wx3.0 built with gtk3 so someone else
is at least blazing a trail, but we have quite a lot more packages than
Fedora, so even if it's otherwise good for them, we could still hit more
problems.

So we really are going to need significant amounts of testing of reverse
dependencies.  I'm not clear if this is an ABI compatible change, but if
not we will also need to rebuild of all the C++ reverse dependencies.

After the 2.8 to 3.0 transition, I really don't have the energy or time
to manage what will effectively be another wx transition so soon, and
I'm going to have limited time for Debian until September.

So if you want to keep webview for stretch, you're going to need to do a
lot of the work to make that actually happen.  As a start, I'd suggest
rebuilding with gtk3 enabled, uploading that to experimental, and
encouraging maintainers to test their packages with it.

Cheers,
    Olly