[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#830624: ITP: xplayer -- Simple media player based on GStreamer.

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 07/11/2016 06:39 PM, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> I don't think this is a fair assessment. There are several desktops that are
> based on the GTK libraries. A GTK application that uses the library but does not
> use any desktop specific libraries / extensions / etc, can be considered desktop
> agnostic for any of the GTK desktops.

Installing the MATE libraries for Pluma comes at very little cost. Maintaining
an additional package in Debian costs more, see below.

> I'm in the camp of people that dislike the new gedit and I would welcome a
> maintained text editor that uses GTK but is not linked against mate or
> cinnamon or xfce or any other GTK desktop.

The Debian Wiki lists 16 text editors (excluding Pluma) [1] and probably shows
just a little selection of what we have in Debian. Are you really sure there is
no editor that suits your needs?

> I have not looked in detail into these new applications, but in general I think
> that the idea sounds like a good one and I don't think it's fair to dismiss them
> as desktop-agnostic because they use the GTK library.

My main argument is not whether these applications are desktop agnostic or not, my
main argument is that adding another text editor (or any package in general) is
not just a matter of upload and forget, it's needs be properly maintained.

I am saying that because we currently have over 1031 RC bugs that affect Stretch [2],
a large number of these bugs exist because the packages in question are either
unmaintained or poorly maintained - these are mostly gcc-6-related or debhelper-
related issues.

These Linux Mint apps are mostly maintained by Clement Lefebvre alone [3] while most
of the other editors are maintained by a larger team. With my personal experience
with Clement and the general quality problem that Linux Mint has [4], I do not
have a lot of trust that he will be able to provide proper maintenance for these
applications in the future and these so-called X apps will just be additional
potential candidates for RC bugs.

If we want to be able to release Stretch, we should rather focus on fixing existing
packages than just adding new packages with redundant functionality but potential
maintenance problems.

Cheers,
Adrian

> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/TextEditor
> [2] https://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
> [3] https://github.com/linuxmint/xed/commits/master
> [4] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-is-an-indicator-of-a-larger-problem/

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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