Comment by soldthat

I get the appeal of “it still works, so what’s the problem,” but from a distro’s point of view an unmaintained C toolkit with a big ABI surface is a problem. Even if GTK2’s code hasn’t changed, it still has to keep building across new compilers, hardening flags, toolchain transitions, security scans, etc.

Arch can shove that into community repos and say “you’re on your own.” Debian’s promise is different: if it’s in the archive, someone’s implicitly on the hook for it for years. At some point it’s more honest to drop it from main and let people who really want GTK2 own it via containers/Flatpaks/OBS, instead of making everyone else carry an orphaned toolkit forever.