review each port that requires GTK2 to see if it can be moved to GTK3

[jrmarino]

check the catalog, GTK2 port, to see what depends on it.
I checked the first one, hexchat. It actually still requires gtk2 although they are working towards gtk3 support.

The rest of the ports on that list need to check to see if they can move to gtk3.

[kraileth]

Here's a list of ports that currently depend on GTK+2 in RP. Their status will be added after each has been checked.

• dia:standard Dia is Dia ... There's (some) activity in the master branch but no tag / release happened in over a decade. Code in the master branch uses GTK+3 and there has even been talk about GTK4 in the issues. I'm not holding my breath for it, though. Unfortunately it's useful software.
• gtk-murrine-engine:standard This is completely tied to GTK+2 and will eventually be retired together with the toolkit. It's only a reverse dependency for Xfce's official theme. Likely to be dropped when Xfce eventually stops requiring GTK+2.
• hexchat:standard only supports gtk2
• pidgin:standard support for gtk3 skipped. gtk4 supported when version 3.0.0 is released.
• gtk-engines

These were on the list but have been retired:

• leafpad:standard hard requirement for gtk2. replaced with GTK3 fork l3afpad see repology
• libglade:standard (dropped, no longer required by xscreensaver)
• parcellite:standard
• pinentry:gtk2 This is meant for purely GTK+2-based desktops. We don't have any of those. Let's just drop this variant.
• xfconf:standard dependency on gtk2 dropped (unused)
• gwenhywfar:standard qt5, gtk2 and gtk3 GUIs (gtk2 interface dropped)
• qemu:standard gtk3 was supported so it was switched to that from gtk2
• mtr:x11 gtk3 was supported so it was switch to that from gtk2
• libwacom:standard gtk2 was necessary, drop the deps
• libvisual-plugins:standard gtk2 was already switched for gtk3 a while ago
• thunderbird:standard gtk2 was not needed (gtk3 was a dep too)
• gimp:standard version 3.0 uses gtk3
• wxWidgets30:gtk2 This is required for perl-Alien-wxWidgets and perl-Wx-Scintilla which is required for PADRE (perl IDE) which hasn't seen a release in 11 years. Requires dropping PADRE is which something that should be considered seriously. It was dropped by Debian 8 years ago in 2016.
• smpeg:standard Last release was about 12 years ago but repository owner responds. gtk2 isn't needed because the gtk player was never built. configuration patched to stop looking for it.
• gmrun:standard Requires GTK+2 and there's basically no hope it will ever transition. The project hasn't had any release in two decades and the source on sourceforge is still in a CVS repo (which SF stopped supporting in 2017). There is a fork that supports gtk3 though.
• libcanberra:standard has gtk2 and gtk3 subpackages (both are supported) (gtk2 since dropped)
• postgis:standard Still requires gtk2 as of version 3.5
• libvisual-plugins gtk2 header was required for build, but it's not needed.
• mate-themes left over gtk2 detection - patched out.
• graphviz:standard Can be built without GTK+2 but that means losing libgvplugin_gdk. Maybe override the port like this via unkindness and do an exp-run to see if it's actually used by something or just was some GNOME 2 thing? Various sources on the net seem to indicate that it's optional and people could just ignore warnings related to it not being available. A little weird, though. 1-FEB-2026: that plugin is not present in the port and disabling GTK2 doesn't change the package output.

[jrmarino]

parcellite was dropped, will edit above.

[jrmarino]

libglade was dropped and leafpad was replaced with l3afpad.

[jrmarino]

xfconf listed gtk2 but didn't use it.

[jrmarino]

gwenhywfar had qt5, gtk2 and gtk3 interfaces. gtk2 interface dropped.

[jrmarino]

qemu supports gtk3 so it was switched over.

[jrmarino]

mtr supports gtk3 so it was switched over

[jrmarino]

libwacom doesn't need the gtk2 dependencies, so they were dropped.

[jrmarino]

libvisual-plugins was already converted to gtk3 a while ago.

[jrmarino]

thunderbird's gtk2 was not needed (gtk3 was already a dep)

[jrmarino]

gimp has been converted to gtk3

[jrmarino]

Padre and many dependencies dropped, including perl wxwidgets which required gtk2.

[jrmarino]

smpeg only needed gtk to build because the configuration script checked for it, even though the gtk player was not built. This has been patched to remove gtk2 dependency.

[jrmarino]

gmrun actually does have a gtk3-based fork. Move to it.