Version 2 of the widely used Gtk toolkit will be dropped from the next Debian release. The problem is that many things still need it, including FreePascal and its Lazarus IDE.
Debian 14, codenamed "Forky," is in development and will very probably be released in about 18 months. As with any new release, the developers are removing various old and unsupported packages, including Gtk2. It's already gone from RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE 16, Arch, and others.
Up to a point, this is reasonable. Version 2.0 of what was still called Gtk+ first appeared in March 2002, and the GNOME team working on Gtk declared it dead in December 2020. The final release was Gtk 2.24.33 on December 21.
The problem is that quite a lot of apps still use Gtk2. The Debian announcement links to a list of 139 of them – this translated Russian article mentions 34 of the highlights.
One of these is the FreePascal compiler and its IDE Lazarus, which over on the FreePascal forums has caused some alarm. The team is discussing possible resolutions, such as creating and maintaining its own packages – a substantial task for a small project.
Some of the higher-profile Gtk2 projects, such as the MATE and Xfce desktops, moved to Gtk3 years ago, but it took a substantial amount of work. Smaller projects, such as the handy GKrellM system monitor, haven't got round to it.
Another that hasn't is the Ardour digital audio workstation. The Reg FOSS desk took a brief look at Ardour version 7 in 2022, but development hasn't slackened. Ardour 9.0 came out earlier this month, and 9.2 followed this week. We looked at the new release and discovered something interesting and relevant.
Ardour still uses Gtk2. After Gtk2's end of life, the Ardour team had to find a workaround. The result is its own fork of Gtk2, known as YTK. It switched to the new toolkit a year ago and removed Gtk2 support six months later.
This could be a lifeline for the FreePascal Lazarus IDE, which rather impressed us last year. There's a chance here for multiple FOSS projects to get together and make YTK into something more generally applicable. Does anyone have experience in herding cats? ®
Source: The register