[Freewx-maint] GTK+ 3

[Olly Betts]

On 7 January 2016 at 20:58, Björn Harrtell <bjorn.harrtell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to see wxWidgets use GTK+ 3 sometime in the future and it should be
> supported since wxWidgets 2.9.4 (1) with the configure option --with-gtk=3.
> Has this been considered already? Are there known blocking issues?

I considered it when I packaged wxwxwidgets 3.0, but I talked to wx upstream
about which gtk version to go with and their recommendation at that point was
firmly to stick with gtk2 for now.

That would have been around October 2013, so a little over 2 years ago.  I've
not asked upstream for an update on this, but a quick check with
"git log -i --grep=gtk3" shows 24 GTK3 related commits on the 3.0 branch since
then, so gtk3 support may have improved since them.

However, I'm aware of at least kicad would be broken by such a change:

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

Switching gtk version is going to need significant amounts of testing of reverse
dependencies, and quite likely a rebuild of all the C++ ones.  We only managed
to complete the migration from wxwidgets2.8 to wxwidgets3.0 a week ago, and
I really don't have the time or energy for another big wxwidgets
transition at this
point (and nobody else is very active in wx maintenance lately), so my tentative
plan for Debian is to review the gtk version used when it comes to packaging
wxwidgets3.2, since we'll need to do all the rebuilding and testing for that
anyway.

I don't know what upstream's current plans are for 3.2 though - their roadmap
says "3.1.0 planned for fall 2015" and I don't think that's happened yet:

http://trac.wxwidgets.org/wiki/Roadmap

But at this point, if you want a switch to gtk3 with urgency, I'm
afraid you'll need
to join the team and drive it.  If you want it to have happened before
stretch, you
probably need to start now.

Cheers,
    Olly