[Freewx-maint] wxWidgets 3.x and GTK+ 3

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 08:05:25PM +0200, Björn Harrtell wrote:
> 2017-07-31 7:16 GMT+02:00 Olly Betts <olly at survex.com>:
> > On 6 July 2017 at 08:49, Björn Harrtell <bjorn.harrtell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > FWIW my personal interest in this is to extend the life of
> > > pgadmin3.
> >
> > Does debian's wx packages switching to GTK3 help there?
> > https://www.pgadmin.org/download/ says:
> >
> > | WARNING: pgAdmin 3 is no longer supported.
> >
> > So I'd expect a switch to GTK3 to if anything be bad for Debian's
> > pgadmin3 package, as any issues which are actually in the pgadmin3
> > code won't get solved by pgadmin upstrream.
> 
> I know pgadmin3 is abandoned since quite some time now but some people
> including me would like to see it continued as pgadmin4 isn't a good
> replacement in our view at this time. I'm trying to find a way to gather
> enough interest and people to convince the old maintainer(s) to transfer it
> us, but it needs a certain level of seriousness to be sure.

OK, but I'm still not seeing how switching Debian's wxwidgets3.0 package
to use GTK3 is really relevant to that goal.

Moving our wx packages to GTK3 is something that's clearly going to need
doing at some point, and if we don't do it for buster then boinc-manager
will need patching not to use wxWebView (because the GTK2 implementation
is build on an obsolete webkit version).

But I'm not following why GTK3 is desirable for pgadmin3.  At some point
I may need to make a call as to which way we go, so I'd like to
understand why switching to GTK3 is good or bad for particular rdeps 

> > > However, I'm not confident about the stability of wxWidgets 3.0
> > > with GTK 3 at this time
> >
> > My own testing of a build with GTK3 uncovered some issues.  It seems
> > wx upstream are responsive to GTK3-related bugs, and they've fixed
> > those they can reproduce.
> >
> > However, at least one problem I found they can't reproduce.
> 
> If wx 3.0 and GTK3 is the likely way ahead for buster I'll be glad to
> investigate that road for pgadmin3. I already have some WIP patches for
> that but the maintenance situation needs resolving for it to have value I
> guess.

I'm not really sure what's most likely at this point.  The least effort
solution is almost certainly sticking to wx3.0 + GTK2 and patching
boinc-manager to use wxHtmlWindow, but that's not entirely satisfactory.

BTW, the GTK3 issues I've found so far all affect both 3.0.3.1 and git
master, so the 3.0 vs 3.2 decision looks like it may be fairly
orthogonal to the GTK2 vs GTK3 one.

Cheers,
    Olly