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

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

Hi Olly!


>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).


It's me sorry there ;) Unfortunately I seem to be the only one using this
webview package, I'm a little bit confusing ;)

>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.


Wow, so this might even not be feasible for Stretch either
(maybe you mean jessie instead of squeeze, I hope)

>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 already did a build on localhost, and I'm testing a boinc rebuild on top
of it.
>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.


yes, but  I guess if upstream releases 3.2 in less than one year or so
there still is plenty of time to have the chance to fix bugs...

>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.


that's true

>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.


this isn't really about ABI there...
I tried to run an old boinc on top of the new wxwidgets, and the ldd shows a library with a different name

libwx_gtk2u_webview-3.0.so.0 => not found
libwx_gtk2u_qa-3.0.so.0 => not found
libwx_gtk2u_adv-3.0.so.0 => not found
libwx_gtk2u_core-3.0.so.0 => not found


they are now gtk3u, so I guess we need at least to binNMU rdeps, right?

>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.


Not a problem, if you plan to keep webview until then :)

>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.


This is possible, I just need two things:
1) an upload to experimental (I'm still waiting for DAM, so my nm process is
mostly there, but not too much)
2) a git branch you want me to upload the changes

The graphic with the new wxwidgets seems ugly, at least looks a little bit different

I talked with pochu, we might be able to keep this transition close with the gcc one, since
we already need rebuilds for it...


BTW pochu said on irc that the transition removal of old webkit 1 might even not be feasible for Stretch,
because of python-webkit rdeps

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=oldlibs;users=pkg-webkit-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org

If it is ok for you I'll leave the status quo as how it is now until after September, and see
how the transition of libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 goes.

In the meanwhile we can upload wx on experimental and test the code changes.

cheers,

Gianfranco