This package has Build-Depends on GTK 2 (libgtk2.0-dev), or produces
binary packages with a Depends on GTK 2.

GTK 2 was superseded by GTK 3 in 2011 (see
<https://bugs.debian.org/947713>). It no longer receives any significant
upstream maintenance, and in particular does not get feature development
for new features like UI scaling on high-pixel-density displays (HiDPI)
and native Wayland support. GTK 3 is in maintenance mode and GTK 4 is
approaching release, so it seems like a good time to be thinking about
minimizing the amount of GTK 2 in the archive.

GTK 2 is used by some important productivity applications like GIMP, and
has also historically been a popular UI toolkit for proprietary software
that we can't change, so perhaps removing GTK 2 from Debian will never be
feasible. However, it has reached the point where a dependency on it is
a bug - not a release-critical bug, and not a bug that can necessarily
be fixed quickly, but a piece of technical debt that maintainers should
be aware of.

A porting guide is provided in the GTK 3 documentation:
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/migrating.html

Some libraries (for example libgtkspell0) expose GTK as part of their
API/ABI, in which case removing the deprecated dependency requires
breaking API/ABI. For these libraries, in many cases there will already
be a corresponding GTK 3 version (for example libgtkspell3-3-0), in which
case the GTK 2-based library should probably be deprecated or removed
itself. If there is no GTK 3 equivalent, of a GTK 2-based library,
maintainers should talk to the dependent library's upstream developers
about whether the dependent library should break API/ABI and switch
to GTK 3, or whether the dependent library should itself be deprecated
or removed.

A few packages extend GTK 2 by providing plugins (theme engines, input
methods, etc.) or themes, for example ibus and mate-themes. If these
packages deliberately support GTK 2 even though it is deprecated, and
they also support GTK 3, then it is appropriate to mark this mass-filed
bug as wontfix for now. I have tried to exclude these packages from
the mass-bug-filing, but I probably missed some of them.

Regards,
    smcv

The upstream git repository has evolved to gtk3.
Please consider importing the latest git commit as new version and switch to gkt3.

Which upstream do you mean? As noted in #1067004 there are several
forks, but none of them are maintained:

- the version packaged in Debian comes from sarine.nl / gmpclient.org,
   both of which are now domain-parking placeholders;

- https://github.com/DaveDavenport/gmpc is a fork that has been ported
   to GTK 3, but is specifically labelled as unmaintained, has never done
   a release, and hasn't changed since 2020;

- https://repo.or.cz/w/gmpc.git seems to be an older version of Dave
   Davenport's fork which hasn't changed since 2015

If there is an active upstream that I'm unaware of, or if there is
someone willing to become a new upstream maintainer, please let the mpd
team know.

Thanks,
     smcv

Yes, DaveDavenport is the one with gtk3 support. I suppose it is better to have
an unmaintained gtk3 version instead of an unmaintained gtk2 version.

As announced [1], we are trying to remove gtk2 from forky. Therefore,
I am raising the severity of this issue.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/01/msg00090.html

On behalf of the Debian GNOME team,
Jeremy Bícha