[Freewx-maint] Migrating to GTK+3 packages

[Olly Betts]

On 28 March 2018 at 12:39, Scott Talbert <swt at techie.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Mar 2018, Olly Betts wrote:
>
>> We should think about how to start encouraging people to move across.
>>
>> So far I've switched nautic (orphaned) and sffview, survex, therion
>> (which I maintain or co-maintain).
>
> Cool.  Any major problems so far?

No problems at all, though I already tested the last three a few
months ago and reported the issues I found upstream so for those that
only really means that I didn't miss anything, nothing has regressed,
and nothing new was introduced.

Everything looked OK with nautic, but it doesn't have a very complex UI.

>> Scott: I see you've switch wxpython4.0.  Are you planning to do
>> wxpython3.0 too?
>
> Yes, I'll do wxpython3.0 too.  You might have to do the upload as I would
> plan on bringing back the webview module.  I don't know if bringing an old
> binary package back counts as NEW, but it might?

I think that would count as NEW.  Happy to sponsor the upload.

>> I guess we might get one or two switches from maintainers just noticing
>> the new packages, but I think we ought to more formally announce this
>> soon and start filing bugs against packages to encourage switching.
>
> What is the best way to formally announce?  Or are you assuming bug filing
> would take care of that?

Sending an email to debian-devel with dd-list output on the list of
affected packages is a good start, though it only reached people who
actually read the list.

Creating a transition tracker is another good way as that shows up in
packages.qa.d.o and tracker.d.o.

>> There are two main sources for the packages to address - one is to get
>> a transition tracker set up.  The other is running "dak rm" on the
>> ftp-master mirror machine to see what is broken by removing a package
>> from unstable (which you need to be a DD to do).  The two don't always
>> quite agree thanks to oddball packages with strange dependencies.
>
> 'apt-cache rdepends' doesn't provide a correct list?

AFAIK, you can't query build-depends with apt-cache rdepends, so you
can't actually reliably find everything that would be broken by
removal.

Packages that BD on wx but don't have any run-time dependency are
probably buggy, but there's usually one or two.  It's also not
impossible something could legitimately use wxbase for some build-time
tool.

The really nice thing about "dak rm" is it actually does a dry run of
the procedure that ftpmaster use to remove the specified source or
binary package from unstable which means you find out exactly what the
blockers currently are for doing that.

The transition tracker is more like apt-cache rdepends, but it also
knows about packages in unstable vs testing, statuses of builds on
different architectures, and has an interactive web view plus
integrating nagging via packages.qa.d.o and tracker.d.o - e.g. see:

https://release.debian.org/transitions/html/llvm-defaults.html

> What do you think is best?  I'm happy to help with filing bugs.

I think the transition tracker is the best first step, as that means
we then have an auto-updating view of progress and it automatically
gently prods maintainers.

I'm happy to request one.

Cheers,
    Olly