Debian removes FPC/Lazarus

[Fred vS]

It's not the GTK developers who decide this, it's the distribution maintainers. T

Of course I'm aware of that. But these distros are often influenced by Big Data (GTK among others).

Though to be fair the GTK developers would probably prefer for GTK2 to be long gone already and GTK3 being on the way out, considering that their preference is on GTK4 now... 🤔

Yes, but I don't think they'd be offended to know that applications that run on their old engine can still be useful and working.
We completely understand that Wayland wants to wipe the slate clean, and I find that a little sad.

And I'm willing to bet they won't remove GTK3, even though GTK4 is the default. (Because GTK3 is Wayland compatible.)

That said, everyone does what they want, and it's great if you're happy with Wayland or distos without GTK2!

 

[Thaddy]

It's not the GTK developers who decide this, it's the distribution maintainers. T

Huh?

It was the GTK developers who declared GTK2 unmaintained....
(Many moons ago, btw)

So the distribution maintainers simply followed what the developers stated.
That is quite a different truth from yours.

[robert rozee]

It's not the GTK developers who decide this, it's the distribution maintainers. T

Huh?
It was the GTK developers who declared GTK2 unmaintained [...] So the distribution maintainers simply followed what the developers stated. [...]

it seems that you (and many others) are arguing that any piece of software that is considered by its developers to be feature complete, fully functional, and requiring of no further changes is immediately, by definition, 'unmaintained' and should be replaced/removed from distros?!

from what folks seem to be saying, and my own observations of the whole ecosystem, the above is how Desktop Linux works, leaving everything in a continuous state of flux. as one package is replaced with a newer version this in turn triggers a need to replace any upstream or downstream packages; every single package needs to have a team of developers permanently 'attached' to it, perpetually ready to kick off a cycle of renewal when triggered by the renewal of any adjacent package.

what has happened to the concept of stability in the world of Desktop Linux? the notion of things that work, have worked for years gone by, and will continue to work for many years into the future. just like microsoft's win32 API since 1998.


cheers,
rob   :-)

[marcov]

what has happened to the concept of stability in the world of Desktop Linux? 

It never existed.

moderator notice:
Anyway, the reasons for deprecation of GTK2 is now off topic, since this is now going in circles and nothing changed for a couple of dozen posts. If you want to discuss it ad nauseam, use some Debian forum, where it belongs.

[MarkMLl]

what has happened to the concept of stability in the world of Desktop Linux? 

It never existed.

I agree. While there's some binary compatibility across Linux versions and variants for small binary programs, as soon as you're talking about anything larger and /particularly/ when you're talking about GUI-based programs all compatibility goes out of the window.

I can assure you that those of us who were around in the early '90s would have /loved/ something like AppImage, even though the duplication of libraries etc. has major storage implications. As it is, we just had to get used to building stuff from scratch if it wasn't available (and regularly updated) as a binary from the distro maintainer. That became a major pain for large applications like browsers when they became significant.

If you want to discuss it ad nauseam, use some Debian forum, where it belongs.

Without dragging the FPC or wider Pascal communities into it please.

MarkMLl

[dbannon]

moderator notice:
Anyway, the reasons for deprecation of GTK2 is now off topic, since this is now going in circles and nothing changed for a couple of dozen posts. If you want to discuss it ad nauseam, use some Debian forum, where it belongs.

OK, thanks Marcov, I'll close this thread. For anyone who wants to continue it elsewhere -

• https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/01/msg00090.html contains a good starting point.
• https://archlinux.org/todo/gtk-2-eol/ - please don't just beat up Debian, all the other major distros heading the same way.
• https://artixlinux.org/ - as above
• https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/debian_14_will_drop_gtk2/ - a great place to tilt at windmills !

Thanks everyone for your positive contributions.

Davo