gtkmm2.4 is obsolete: documentation for this, and 10.7 ?

Hi there,

today I was trying to build a package using gtkmm2.4 (specifically, the package "surfer"), and since I was using "-m --build-as-nobody" as is my habit, Fink error out like this:

WARNING: The package surfer has a preferred BuildDepends on gtkmm2.4-dev,
	 but gtkmm2.4-dev is an obsolete package.


I was confused at first, because there is no outward sign that gtkmm2.4-dev is obsolete. Indeed, "fink info gtkmm2.4-dev" says nothing about this! Only when I looked at the .info file, did I discover that gtkmm2.4 and gtkmm2.4-dev are obsolete; apparently these days you ought to use gtkmm2.4-gtk-dev and gtkmm2.4-shlibs only.

But several packages to this day depend on gtkmm2.4-dev, and I am not surprised. If this is meant to eventually change, then it should be made crystal clear for packagers that they are doing something wrong, and how to do it right.


Hence, could at the very least the "Description:" fields for gtkmm2.4 and gtkmm2.4-dev be changed to contain "OBSOLETE" and a hint as to what the migration plan is ?


Secondly, a problem that troubles many other packages is the fact that building a package with just one obsolete splitoff will cause fink to install fink-obsolete-package during build time. This is quite annoying; e.g. me personally, I always balk by default when I see that building a package will install fink-obsolete-packages. 

One way to fix this is to not make migration packages a splitoff, but rather have them in a separate .info file. I realize that using splitoffs for migration packages sometimes is important, but in this case, I wonder if it really is... ? At least for 10.7, we have a chance to start with a clean slate. So, can we at least for 10.7 (re)move the obsolete parts into a separate .info file, so that the genuine non-obsolete parts can be built without involving fink-obsolete-package ? Same for glibmm2.4, by the way.

My guess is that we can also do this for the 10.5/10.6 packages, though, there shouldn't be serious migration troubles, right?



Cheers,
Max




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