[Freewx-maint] Bug#644571: uses libgnomeprint which is scheduled for removal

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Wed Oct 12 04:48:02 UTC 2011


On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 12:25:02AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 04:44:59PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > What exactly would be the problems switching back to the internal
> > printing code and which applications would be seriously affected by
> > this?
> 
> I'll give it a try and see.

OK, I built wx --without-gnomeprint and tried it with survex-aven (since
it's a package I maintain and know well).

The first problem is there's no print preview - when you build it, the
preview button is disabled if wxUSE_LIBGNOMEPRINT is defined (since
this avoids having print preview buttons on two consecutive dialogs).
This is essentially an assumption in the survex code that the wx it
was built against is configured the same way as the one it is run
with.  That's arguably a bug, but I don't think you can easily
dynamically test for features in the wx library you get dynamically
linked against.

The next problem is that the print options default to print just the
first page, though this isn't totally obvious (it shows as the pages
radio button selected (rather than all) and 1 to <blank> in the range.

The other issue I noticed is that you can now only print PostScript
rather than PDF, which is annoying - you can pretty much rely on
people having a PDF viewer but PostScript ones are rarer, and having
to convert with an external tool is annoying.

On the plus side, if I rebuild survex-aven then the built in preview
seems to work better than I remember.

So based on this single data point, disabling gnomeprint will cause at
least some issues with dependent packages of wx.

> OK.  I think if the internal code proves problematic I'll look at the
> feasibility of trying to backport the gtkprint code to 2.8 

I'll definitely take a look at this.

> I'd like to migrate everyone from 2.6 to 2.8 and get the 2.6 packages
> removed for wheezy, though I'm not sure how realistic that is yet.  I
> discussed this with Ron a bit last night, and he seems to think it's
> time to start pushing in that direction, so I'm going to start working
> on that soon.

Having gone through the packages involved, it seems realistic to me:

http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/WxWidgets/Transition2.6to2.8

Cheers,
    Olly





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