xfce.terminal: 0.6.3 -> 0.8.5.1

[vanschelven]

This is my first (possible) contribution to nixpkgs, so be aware of any beginner mistakes.

Particular doubts that I have are:

• The upgrade pulls in vte-2.91; taking a look at how nixpkgs deals with vte-2.90 I have made yet another duplicate of the vte library. So now there's the default, 2.90 (used by a few other packages still) and 2.91. I have the feeling a deduplication is in order, but I'm not sure which one it is.
• The new file for vte 2.91 was created with the user-pattern copy/paste/adapt - I do not pretend to fully understand what I've built.
• VTE 2.91 adds the following 2 propagatedBuildInputs: pcre2 & gnutls. As far as I understand this might be not good practice. The reason I've added them is because pkg-config, when run in the build context of xfce.terminal, cannot otherwise find the package vte-2.91 because of a dependency error. Someone more

Feel free to clean up my work or point me in the right direction for doing so. If nothing else, this PR might serve as a point of reference for someone else doing it right.

Motivation for this change

Motivated by 0.6.3 being several years old

Things done

• Tested using sandboxing
  (nix.useSandbox on NixOS,
  or option build-use-sandbox in nix.conf
  on non-NixOS)
• Built on platform(s)
  • NixOS
  • macOS
  • Linux
• Tested compilation of all pkgs that depend on this change using nix-shell -p nox --run "nox-review wip"
• Tested execution of all binary files (usually in ./result/bin/)
• Fits CONTRIBUTING.md.

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[mention-bot]

@vanschelven, thanks for your PR! By analyzing the history of the files in this pull request, we identified @vcunat, @Fuuzetsu and @dezgeg to be potential reviewers.

[vanschelven]

I can't really weight in on the "by design or not" from the perspective of NixOs; other than the fact that the fact that most packages are stuck on a pre-gnome3 version might as well be explained by laziness (not to be understood as a language feature but rather a feature of humanity) as by being a design decision proper.

I did do a bit of research on whether there are any Xfce-given reasons to hold back to the GTK+2 versions, but I can't really find any such indication on their site. As a matter of fact I couldn't find any support schedules on the Xfce site, which leads me to understand their policy as "just push forward and let the distributions deal with the rest" - but I might be wrong.

The first version of Xfce that contained GTK+3 components was Xfce 4.12, released on February 28, 2015. Also there's this discussion on moving forward to Xfce 4.14, which talks of a full transition to GTK+3.

And then there's "what is everyone else doing"; at least Ubuntu, Fedora & Arch are pushing forward to the new Xfce libraries. Millions of users can't be wrong 😛

[vcunat]

gtk3 in xfce hasn't been declared stable yet upstream AFAIK.

[romildo]

Once I have submitted a PR (#16658) to update libxfce4ui_gtk3 to version 4.13.0, which is considered unstable. So I have closed it.

[Mic92]

If there are not breaking changes, I would update vte_290 and rename it to vte_29 rather then having a dedicated package.

[vanschelven]

@volth said

I am not against the progress, but I think it might have sense to do the upgrade of all xfce components at once (release of 4.14 is a good timepoint for that) to avoid possible inter-component issues as they migrate to gtk3 one by one.

I agree, so I'll close this PR for now.

For future reference, I've asked on the xfce dev mailing list what the status of the various projects is. The answer is here:

https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2017-June/031966.html

The most important bits are:

Xfce 4.12 is stable, Xfce 4.14 will be considered stable when it's released.

If you look at https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce-announce/ archives, you'll see that lots of 4.12 components got bugfix/point releases since 4.12.0. Once 4.14 is released, bugfixes should concentrate on that 4.14 branch, there's not enough manpower to maintain two branches with totally different base components..

As for stability, some distros started shipping parts of Xfce using already-migrated-to-gtk3 components, most of the developers are running Gtk3 versions of components (4.13.something, considered 'development releases'), bugs are being squashed out, and (to me) it's usable daily. YMMV.

[vcunat]

Well, if we knew 4.14 would be ready before our next stable release (September), I wouldn't be against migrating all Xfce to the gtk3 versions now (in advance), but I don't think they would give similar "guarantees".