A dead game clock
Time flies. Back in 2008, I wrote a game clock. Since then, what was first called "chess clock" was renamed to pychessclock and then Gameclock (2008). It shipped with Debian 6 squeeze (2011), 7 wheezy (4.0, 2013, with a new UI), 8 jessie (5.0, 2015, with a code cleanup, translation, go timers), 9 stretch (2017), and 10 buster (2019), phew! Eight years in Debian over 4 releases, not bad!
But alas, Debian 11 bullseye (2021) won't ship with Gameclock because both Python 2 and GTK 2 were removed from Debian. I lack the time, interest, and energy to port this program. Even if I could find the time, everyone is on their phone nowadays.
So finding the right toolkit would require some serious thinking about how to make a portable program that can run on Linux and Android. I care less about Mac, iOS, and Windows, but, interestingly, it feels it wouldn't be much harder to cover those as well if I hit both Linux and Android (which is already hard enough, paradoxically).
(And before you ask, no, Java is not an option for me thanks. If I switch to anything else than Python, it would be Golang or Rust. And I did look at some toolkit options a few years ago, was excited by none.)
So there you have it: that is how software dies, I guess. Alternatives include:
- Chessclock - really old Ruby which made Gameclock rename
- Ghronos - also really old Java app
- Lichess - has a chess clock built into the app
- Otter - if you squint a little
PS: Monkeysign also suffered the same fate, for what that's worth. Alternatives include caff, GNOME Keysign, and pius. Note that this does not affect the larger Monkeysphere project, which will ship with Debian bullseye.
To be honest, I didn't realize GTK2 and Python 2 actually shipped with Bullseye, I had assumed they would be completely gone.
Those are the technical reasons why those packages were removed:
So while none of those were removed because Python 2 was removed itself, those removals are direct consequences of the deprecation of Python 2. The Gameclock removal bug even explicitly says:
The python-dnspython package was also explicitly removed as part of the Python 2 removal work:
So, sure, bullseye ships with Python 2 and GTK2, but there's no pygtk, and many Debian packages dropped their Python 2 versions, sometimes deliberately, so it's kind of splitting hairs to say that Python 2 still exists in bullseye... It's not because we actually failed to remove the Python 2 package that it is still really there.
(To be honest, I'm actually puzzled by the presence of Python 2 in bullseye: given all the effort we've given to remove all that cruft, it seems to me it should just be removed already. As far as I can tell, nothing really depends on it anymore, does it?)