A decision regarding dependencies and wxWidgets in Saucedacity

[generic-pers0n]

Edits

Date format: mm/dd/yyyy
4/16/2022: Added further specific details for wxWidgets.

Original Post

Hey guys, generic-pers0n here. I know that I haven't been too active on Saucedacity in a while. Other stuff has kind of been taking priority at the moment, especially since that has started to heat up around now (nothing bad, just getting more active is all). However, I'm still here! If someone wants to help manage this project, just start with a few issues and by making a couple of pull requests. I could probably use a couple of those for bug fixes ;).

Anyways, there has been some things regarding dependencies in Audacity that kind of made its dependencies a little...fragmented, to say the least (from what I can tell anyways). One common thing is wxWidgets, which has been a bit of a problem for Linux distributions that don't ship wxWidgets 3.1.6 (the current development version at the time of writing) and only ship wxWidgets 3.0.5 ( the current stable version at the time of writing). Saucedacity inherits this entire scene.

While there has been little work regarding dependencies (namely submodules in lib-src/), this will start to change. Starting from this point on, Saucedacity will be tested against system dependencies rather than local/downstream dependencies. This includes wxWidgets.

The overall intention for this is for a couple of reasons:

1. I want to ultimately get rid and re-evaluate lib-src/ in the Saucedacity source tree
2. I want to test how well Saucedacity fairs against some modern versions of dependencies in lib-src, be it without modifications to Saucedacity. (Those should come naturally in order to get Saucedacity running against those dependencies again).
3. I want to move Saucedacity's dependencies from downstream to upstream versions, where applicable. (This correlates with point 1 above).

wxWidgets

wxWidgets deserves its own discussion, which is why it's in its own section.

Currently, only one thing will change: we will no longer build against Audacity's version of wxWidgets. However, for the time being, we will continue to build against wxWidgets 3.1.x (3.1.6 at the time of this writing). It is expected that wxWidgets 3.1.6 will be the last version before the next stable version (wxWidgets 3.2.0) is released. From then on, Saucedacity will start to built and tested against wxWidgets 3.2.0, over time becoming a requirement for Saucedacity. This should work well as time progresses since I figure that most Linux distros will start to ship wxWidgets 3.2.0 once its released. If this becomes an issue, feel free to discuss it here.

What this means

For end-users on Windows, you should not need to worry about anything. For users on Linux, here comes the greatest concern. However, I have a plan for this: we aim to build release versions of Saucedacity on the latest LTS version of Ubuntu (20.04 at the time of writing). This should hopefully provide a solid base to test dependencies against. (In fact, this is what was done for the latest 1.1 stable release; this was primarily due to #16 since Saucedacity was built on a newer distro than what was being ran here).

If you guys have any questions, comments, concerns, or anything, please either open a new issue or leave it here in this discussion. I'll try to answer you guys whenever I can, and maybe we can get it resolved soon. Thanks for your support 😄 ❤️

Updates

Clarification on wxWidgets

As I have been thinking this through a little more for wxWidgets. I have made another important decision regarding wxWidgets development going forward: I will be testing Saucedacity against GTK 3 going forward. This will allow me to focus on any issues with Saucedacity under wxGTK with GTK3.

I have made this decision trying to fix an issue with the device toolbar's drop-down menus being unreasonably long. This appears to happen only under GTK 3, and hence why going forward, I will drop testing against GTK 2.