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

[Björn Harrtell]

Thanks for the thorough explanation of the current state.

I've posted a question on the wxWidgets user mail list on the prospects of
a 3.2 release this year.

If 3.2 is way off, perhaps it can still be worth switching to GTK 3 for
wxWidgets 3.0. FWIW my personal interest in this is to extend the life of
pgadmin3. However, I'm not confident about the stability of wxWidgets 3.0
with GTK 3 at this time but will try to assert that and also do the ABI
comparison.

/Björn

2017-07-05 1:38 GMT+02:00 Olly Betts <olly at survex.com>:

> Björn Harrtell <bjorn.harrtell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm wondering if there are any plans to package wxWidgets 3.0/3.1
> > compiled for GTK+ 3?
>
> It's not feasible to package wxWidgets 3.1, as it doesn't have a stable
> ABI - each new upstream version would potentially require a library
> transition in Debian.
>
> I had been hoping to switch to GTK3 with wx 3.2, but currently it looks
> unlikely to me that upstream will release 3.2 soon, or at least soon
> enough for it to be feasible to switch to for buster (we probably have
> about 16 months before the buster freeze.  The 2.8 to 3.0 transition
> took around a year, though there were quite a lot of incompatibilities
> to deal with - I'd hope 3.0 to 3.2 is smoother, but even so with the
> number of reverse dependencies wx has in Debian, a transition will take
> time).
>
> History has shown we also don't really have the resources to maintain two
> versions of wxWidgets in parallel (whenever we've had multiple versions
> packaged, all but one has essentially been left to rot).  So it would
> really need a complete switch to wx 3.0 using GTK3 for buster.
>
> > Is there anything I can do to help?
>
> The first thing we need to determine is whether the GTK version used
> affects the ABI of the built libraries, so that would be useful to
> check.  To do that, grab the package source from the git repo (best
> to use that as it has 3.0.3.1), and build it, then modify it to use
> GTK3 and build again.  Compare the two outputs with an ABI comparison
> tool (e.g. abi-compliance-checker).
>
> If they're not ABI compatible, this will need a library transition and
> coordination with the release team.
>
> Either way, it's also likely to need a significant amount of fielding of
> bug reports as the maintainers and users of the rdeps find problems
> due to the switch.  These will need analysing to decide if they're specific
> to Debian or not, and if not if there's already a fix upstream we can
> cherry pick, or if there's already an open bug upstream, or if it needs a
> new upstream bug report.  So help with all that would be very useful.
>
> Cheers,
>     Olly
>
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