Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 18, 2026 9:50 UTC (Sun) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424)
In reply to: Maybe a hint? by rgmoore
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

In GTK's case, the deprecations/removals are because there are just a handful of GTK core developers/maintainers. They cannot reasonably maintain forever all APIs, which is understandable.

However as noted in an earlier comment, a "gtk-legacy" and "gtk-future" modules could be created to provide partial compatibility layers.

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Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 18, 2026 12:00 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

> In GTK's case, the deprecations/removals are because there are just a handful of GTK core developers/maintainers. They cannot reasonably maintain forever all APIs, which is understandable.

Absolutely.

>However as noted in an earlier comment, a "gtk-legacy" and "gtk-future" modules could be created to provide partial compatibility layers.

Maintained by whom, exactly? The same folks that "understandably" removed all of the old APIs because they don't have the resources to "reasonably maintain them forever"?

If that maintenance is by some other mythical entity, what stops them from simply maintaining GTK2 in its current state?

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 19, 2026 3:11 UTC (Mon) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (2 responses)

What I had in mind is that big projects like Linux Mint, MATE, Ardour, GIMP and others would coordinate some efforts to ease GTK usage outside what GTK maintainers are able to provide. What I've achieved for text editor projects is a few libgedit-* modules. For example libgedit-amtk for extending GTK 3 with an alternative API to create menus and toolbars (because GtkUIManager is deprecated in GTK 3).

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 19, 2026 17:08 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

What I had in mind is that big projects like Linux Mint, MATE, Ardour, GIMP and others would coordinate some efforts to ease GTK usage outside what GTK maintainers are able to provide.

I don't know that those projects have the resources to do what you're suggesting. For example, GIMP is still in the process of fully transitioning from their old libraries to GEGL. They don't have spare developers to devote to maintaining old GTK; if they had more resources they'd want to devote them to speeding up development of their graphics stack rather than maintaining underlying libraries. I agree that maintaining those old libraries would be a worthwhile task, but I don't think projects that are already operating on a shoestring are the place to find the resources.

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 20, 2026 9:23 UTC (Tue) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

At this point we can say that probably almost all FLOSS desktop components are under-resourced, except rare exceptions (thinking about Qt, Blender, LibreOffice maybe?).