kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Carsten Schoenert <c.schoenert@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Seth,

Am 18.05.2018 um 19:27 schrieb Seth Hillbrand:
> 
> ​I'll second Tom's suggestion here.  Distros are free to package KiCad
> how they like, but we can create an AppImage[1] with GTK2 and wxpython​
> that users can download from the website.  This would provide a way for
> all users to run KiCad even if their distro doesn't package the required
> libraries.  Bug reports on GTK3 could then be redirected to the AppImage
> download link.

please don't try to be clever that way and think twice before KiCad
upstream will ignoring the decisions that are made by the Linux
distributions. Such a behavior wouldn't be really distro friendly as
proposed.

GTK3+ was introduced in 2011 which is seven years from now, so it's not
that this was changing every two years. And now we have already GTK4+
available.

Linux distributions are not really amused about shipped releases of
software which are including embedded libraries as such things are a
nightmare for supporting such software in a long term because they need
to do then security fixes not only on the mainly shipped libraries
packages but also in all package that are included a embedded copy. This
isn't working really well and costs a lot of energy.

>From a Debian view the current state isn't that problematic as maybe
someone is imagine. It's currently not clear if the dropping of GTK2+ is
possible for the next release Buster (about one year from now). The
freeze for the packages is in January 2019, this isn't that far away
from now. My personal impression is that we will still have GTK2+
related packages in Buster.
The current stable release Stretch isn't a problem as the packages and
versions are frozen.

-- 
Regards
Carsten Schoenert