Bug#757308: grass: Please update to use wxpython3.0

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2014 at 03:46:15PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> just a metacomment:  Due to the wxPython issue several packages get RC
> bugs filed which in several cases leads to the fact that these are
> simply removed from testing and either create a lot of work or will be
> lost for the Jessie release.

All the bugs I've filed for the wxpython3.0 transition are currently
severity important (as recommended here:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam/Transitions), which means
none are RC.

Are you actually talking about wxWidgets?  The bugs for the wxwidgets3.0
transition are mostly RC currently, as most have been filed for some
time.  But the testing autoremoval takes into account whether there's
activity on the bug before removing, as documented here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/11/msg00007.html

I've just looked through the packages which have been auto-removed so
far, and most of these bugs have had no response from the maintainer
(even when I've included a patch - e.g. #749870 and #751552), or the
maintainer has explicitly been OK with the package being removed from
testing.

It seems to me the big issue here is really that we have a lot of
maintainers who don't respond to bugs in their packages.

I'm intending to do a pass over the packages which are still using
wxwidgets2.8 and try to get as many as possible moved over.  My aim
here is to migrate Debian to wxwidgets3.0 rather than to remove any
package that stands in the way of removing wxwidgets2.8.

If you're alluding to #750910 particularly, the issue there was that
there's a significantly newer upstream version, and so trying to port
the current package to wx3 seemed a bad approach.  You'd indicated
that the maintainers were going to look at updating, so I left it at
that.

> IMHO this is bad timing to get a predependency for several
> applications removed quite close to a release date.

I left wxpython3.0 until later because it released a few months after
wxwidgets3.0, and I expect fewer problems (e.g. the Unicode handling
changes cause FTBFS for some C++ applications, but aren't a problem
for Python apps).  The packages I've looked at so far seem to mostly
bear this out.

I would certainly rather have started the wxpython3.0 work sooner, but
I'm the only active wx maintainer in recent times (though Gianfranco
Costamagna has started to get involved recently), and I've been busy
with the wxwidgets3.0 transition - there's only so much I can do at
once.

But that's also the reason why we need to try to eliminate wxwidgets2.8
from jessie - I just don't have the time to maintain packages of such
a large upstream project which the upstream maintainers are no longer
interested in.  Nobody else in Debian seems interested in actually
helping to maintain 2.8, and the alternative is to have unmaintained
packages of such a large, complex and widely used piece of software.

Cheers,
    Olly