Please upgrade to GTK+ 3
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#191 Please upgrade to GTK+ 3
As you may be aware, Xournal has been removed from Debian testing because it relies on GTK+ 2 libraries: Bug #885777. I know it's going to be a monumental task, but what are the plans to migrate Xournal to GTK+ 3? What can non C programmers do to help?
Debian is completely off its rocker... The issue is not with GTK2 (not
deprecated, fortunately given that even GIMP hasn't managed to migrate
to GTK3 yet), but rather with the canvas widget for GTK2,
libgnomecanvas, which they have declared deprecated because its name is
part of a series of libraries that are mostly obsolete. The problem is
that there isn't a good replacement.
libgnomecanvas is not related to libgnome in any way despite the name.
It provides a high-performance canvas widget for GTK2, it is the
standard canvas widget for GTK2. There is no good replacement for GTK3.
I am not aware of any serious issues with it apart from it being old.
The two GTK3 canvases that aim to provide something similar to
libgnomecanvas, foocanvas/geocanvas and goocanvas, are not so
well-maintained, not as well-optimized, and not as standard as
libgnomecanvas. I don't want to invest a lot of effort into switching
to one just to have Debian declare it deprecated the following year.
The official Debian line that libgnomecanvas is deprecated in favor of
cairo is nonsense since the two don't offer equivalent functionality --
it's impossible to port libgnomecanvas software to rely only on cairo
and the cairo ecosystem.
Please consider un-deprecating libgnomecanvas. Despite the lack of
active development, it is a useful library, has no security issues that
I am aware of, and software that people want to use depends on it.
I don't have time to port xournal to GTK3 and a GTK3 canvas at the
moment. You can try using the gtk3 branch from Daniel German's git
repository, but I am not ready to adopt this as the main upstream
xournal, and probably won't have time to migrate xournal to GTK3 or to a
different canvas widget for the next couple of years at least.
If Debian persists, I would simply advise xournal users to install
libgnomecanvas and xournal outside of the distribution's package manager
-- or try switching to Daniel's GTK3 xournal branch.
Sorry for the not very helpful response, I realize it's not pleasant for
users to be stuck in the middle of this, but I'm just not able to port
xournal to GTK3 in a satisfactory way with the amount of time that I can
spend on it in the foreseeable future. Someday there will be a next-gen
xournal with a more flexible architecture that will provide some level
of canvas-independence, but it's not there yet and won't even be
seriously started anytime soon given work and family constraints.
Denis
Thank you so much for commenting on the bug. I hope that an agreeable solution gets worked out. You are right: it sucks for users to be stuck in the middle of a deprecation war with few viable alternatives.