Debian removes FPC/Lazarus

[robert rozee]

"Wayland is the future," they say. Okay, but the present says, "Wayland belongs in the trash."

circling back to GTK2 et al, does Wayland tend to favour Qt over GTK? or to put it another way, could the rise of Wayland be seen as a means of advancing the fortunes of Qt and its associated contributor license agreement?

[...] the rest of the views are from bots [...]

that is quite a bizarre claim indeed. i feel that much of the discussion in this thread has been well formed, certainly not produced by (automated?) "bots"! you are sounding a little paranoid.

[...] Whatever we think about it the migration to Wayland is a "done deal", and shooting ones mouth off in public about that will not be to the advantage of this community [...]

no, it is not a "done deal". Wayland could easily come undone if en-mass developers refused to support it. distros would need to quickly back down if major package contributors refused to comply - imagine if Libre Office and The GIMP said no.


btw, i see that two postings by Fred vS have just disappeared from this thread - what happened to them?


cheers,
rob.

[marcov]

"Wayland is the future," they say. Okay, but the present says, "Wayland belongs in the trash."

circling back to GTK2 et al, does Wayland tend to favour Qt over GTK? or to put it another way, could the rise of Wayland be seen as a means of advancing the fortunes of Qt and its associated contributor license agreement?

No, I'd advise you to drink less conspiracy juice. It is just the same reason as why FPC doesn't port FPC 2.4.0 to new architectures. Time.

[Fred vS]

btw, i see that two postings by Fred vS have just disappeared from this thread - what happened to them?

I destroyed them. They were excessive, therefore insignificant. 

[MarkMLl]

[...] the rest of the views are from bots [...]

that is quite a bizarre claim indeed. i feel that much of the discussion in this thread has been well formed, certainly not produced by (automated?) "bots"! you are sounding a little paranoid.

Are you /really/ incapable of distinguishing between "views are from bots" and "produced by ... bots" ?

My apologies to the community if that sounds ad-hominem, but I'm beginning to find this quite exasperating and feel that the discussion could be usefully truncated at the point where we worked out what Debian was actually doing.

MarkMLl

[robert rozee]

[...] Are you /really/ incapable of distinguishing between "views are from bots" and "produced by ... bots" ? [...]

"the christmas cards i receive are from my grandmother"; i would consider it peculiar to think or say "the christmas cards i receive are produced by my grandmother". unless my grandmother was a mechanical printing press, which i can assure you she was not.

i suspect it is a cultural difference that caused the confusion, i am English, and speak English. i assume you are American, and speak American? perhaps you could have said "... the rest of the views have clearly been generated by bots (as i disagree with them) and repeated here by misguided organic humans ...".


cheers,
rob   :-)

[MarkMLl]

i assume you are American, and speak American?

I suggest you avoid Sussex after having said that.

I'm British: Welsh.

MarkMLl

[robert rozee]

Mae hynny'n egluro popeth, ta   


Iechyd da,
rob   :-)

[Martin_fr]

[...] Are you /really/ incapable of distinguishing between "views are from bots" and "produced by ... bots" ? [...]

"the christmas cards i receive are from my grandmother"; i would consider it peculiar to think or say "the christmas cards i receive are produced by my grandmother". unless my grandmother was a mechanical printing press, which i can assure you she was not.

i suspect it is a cultural difference that caused the confusion, i am English, and speak English. i assume you are American, and speak American? perhaps you could have said "... the rest of the views have clearly been generated by bots (as i disagree with them) and repeated here by misguided organic humans ...".

Well, forgive me (both of you) for chiming in here...

But here is the original post:

i notice there are around 700 threads on this section of the forums (Lazarus » Forum » Programming » Operating Systems » Linux), and that this topic has received 43422 views. it is ranking at number 3 on the most viewed list, which to me seems pretty impressive. forum members are interested in the discussion, [...]

No, forum members are interested to know what Debian's doing and the rest of the views are from bots.

His (MarkMLI's) use of "views" is a clear reference to the quoted statement that the topic is being viewed (i.e. view = read). So clearly not "view" as "expressed opinion" that someone would have written (produced).

[robert rozee]

[...] [MarkMLI's] use of "views" is a clear reference to the quoted statement that the topic is being viewed (i.e. view = read). So clearly not "view" as "expressed opinion" that someone would have written (produced).

Martin, you raise an excellent point! to be completely unambiguous perhaps Mark should have written "... and the rest of the viewings are from bots", but i think that by that point Mark and I had both got caught up in the heat of the moment. in retrospect, i must concede that we were both (inadvertently) talking about completely different things.   

ain't English a wonderfully confusing language...


cheers,
rob   :-)

[Martin_fr]

ain't English a wonderfully confusing language...

Off topic, but nothing ain't not as totally ambivalent as the wordly productions made by one Sir Humphrey Appleby ... But it is thanks to him that the point risen by you that is the starting point to my excursion into the world of possibilities with reference to interpretations has had its prove received.

[MarkMLl]

ain't English a wonderfully confusing language...

Off topic, but nothing ain't not as totally ambivalent as the wordly productions made by one Sir Humphrey Appleby ... But it is thanks to him that the point risen by you that is the starting point to my excursion into the world of possibilities with reference to interpretations has had its prove received.

Indeed, not to mention the diversions provided by his colleague Mr Bernard Woolley. However what is- at least marginally- relevant is that most programming languages (with the notable exception of the long-forgotten Dragon BASIC) are based on the English vocabulary, some approximation of English syntax, and- in particular- the American English character set. That latter becomes relevant when trying to extend Pascal/ALGOL with arbitrary user-declared operators.

X11's support of Unicode is adequate for that sort of thing, including when it's tunneled over SSH. The fact that Wayland is likely- particularly if XWayland withers- to be inadequate is obviously highly regrettable, /but/ there's a limit to how vociferous a community such as ours can be without its rebounding on us.

/Perhaps/ if we'd picked up on the tunneled-operation issues earlier and "made waves" in the context of Wayland, we might have got somewhere. But making an argument that something like GTK2, effectively "put out to pasture" by its own developers, should be kept alive indefinitely is far more difficult.

But what to do with the packages that still need Gtk+2?. Considering Gtk+2 "complete" is the correct approach. Distros need not support it, but they shouldn't discourage community support for it either. Take Arch as a study. Gtk+2 was just recently removed from Arch proper, but it is still community maintained in AUR and available to anyone running arch that needs or wants it. You just have to download the AUR package, gzip -d, and then "makepkg -s" and you have your Gtk+2. This model has worked well, and to Arch's credit they have developed the AUR and provide a good community support for those wishing (or needing) to have access to "complete" packages. Arch doesn't provide it as part of the distro, it doesn't meet the active-upstream criteria, but it is still available for those that need it. After all, "choice" was the corner-stone of the open-source movement and for Linux in particular. A "forced choice" is no choice at all, it's an ultimatum.

Above from drankinatty's contribution at https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2026/02/26/debian_14_will_drop_gtk2/ . I agree wholeheartedly with his points, but the one that I'm trying to make here is that upsetting the Debian (hence Ubuntu etc.) community would probably rebound on us.

MarkMLl

[Fred vS]

... but the one that I'm trying to make here is that upsetting the Debian (hence Ubuntu etc.) community would probably rebound on us.

Who cares? Free Pascal is "Free" as in "Freedom" and has no fear of its community's opinions, even if it bothers the most powerful. 

[Fred vS]

Linux represents only a very small percentage of PC users.

Debian should therefore do everything in its power to protect FPC, a compiler of such high quality.

Shame on them.

[Fred vS]

And I understand Rob's indignation.

Removing GTK2 by default while integrating XWayland is yet another tactic to genocide step by step X11, with arguments like "it's too old," "it no longer has commits," and "it takes up space."

[EDIT] About the argument "GTK2 package takes up place":
- Download Size: ~2.5 MB to 3.5 MB (compressed).
- Installed Size: ~12 MB to 15 MB of disk space.

Okay, I'll stop.

[robert rozee]

[...] Above from drankinatty's contribution at https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2026/02/26/debian_14_will_drop_gtk2/ . I agree wholeheartedly with his points, but the one that I'm trying to make here is that upsetting the Debian (hence Ubuntu etc.) community would probably rebound on us.

i find it hard to believe that the Debian folks are so thin-skinned that they would be offended by this little thread of ours. then again, perhaps our thread is just one of a thousand others popping up on the internet that collectively pose some sort of a perceived 'threat' to Debian's world view. words, freely spoken, can be powerful things.


and i was pleased to read The Register thread, which largely encapsulates many of my own sentiments. i had not previously been aware of that thread, which amongst other things explains what i consider to be one of the practical problems between Lazarus and Qt:

Qt [...] needs a special shim library since FPC has the feature [...] that it can't interwork directly with code that uses C++ classes etc.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2026/02/26/debian_14_will_drop_gtk2/#c_5236355

i was not aware of this C++ issue. Mark - are you able to expand more on this outside of the thread? i would very much like to be able to statically bind libQt5Pas into a lazarus-created ELF binary, if it were possible.

btw: i started another thread titled "could Ardour's YTK be used as a GTK2 replacement?" (https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,73590.0.html), but only MarcoV posted to it - and that was not a very useful posting. while i'm not in a position to kick off such a project (integrating YTK into Lazarus as another widget set option) myself, it does seem like something worth exploring. no, not writing code! exploring in the sense of gaining some idea of how much bulk it would add to an ELF binary, to what degree YTK retains function calls that the LCL would need - and what needed function calls are missing, and the extent of modification to the LCL that would be needed. being able to (via existing GTK2 support along with incorporating YTK source) would add another string to Lazarus' bow going forward.


cheers,
rob   :-)