[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#894055: gwyddion: Depends on gconf

[David Nečas (Yeti)]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 08:38:04AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Since I guess the issue is not only relevant for Debian but also for
> other distributions which will probably not provide gconf as well, I'd
> like to forward the issue to you and hope that the links below will give
> you sufficient documentation to get rid of gconf in gwyddion.

Gwyddion does not require GConf; it can be simply compiled without.
I trust Debian can do that.  GConf was only used to register a
thumbnailer in some desktop environments.

So GConf specifically is not a problem.

> gconf's last release was about 5 years ago. It has been replaced by
> gsettings

This, however, sends a sad message to developers of software that value
backward compatibility:  Never depend on anything, nevery use any system
services, write everything from scratch, embed what you cannot write
from scratch and do not even think about environment integration.

Five years is nothing.  Gwyddion has been maintaining backward
compatibility for a dozen of years – and hope to maintain it for
another dozen.  Of course it utilises some old technologies.

Apparently, conservative libraries like FFTW can be trusted, but
anything GUI related goes to hell after 10 years – and anything related
to desktop envronments after 3.<sigh>

Regards,

Yeti