On Mon, 06 Aug 2018 at 06:56:34 +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> I know you don't want to work on this package anymore. Yet it seems to
> me that actual deprecation (like python2) is still quite far away.
dbus-glib *is* deprecated: its upstream and downstream maintainers
discourage its use (it was officially deprecated in 2015, and informally
discouraged ever since GDBus became stable). Unfortunately, this does
not mean people have actually stopped using it, and does not mean that
it can be removed from Debian in a finite time.
> The last upstream release happend in 2018. This
> doesn't look that deprecated to me.
I know when upstream releases happened, because it's normally me
that makes them. The most recent release was to decouple dbus-python
(which shares a small amount of libdbus <-> GLib integration code) from
dbus-glib, in the hope that this would reduce dbus-glib installations.
Having releases does not necessarily make software a good idea to use.
dbus-glib has design flaws that cannot be fixed without breaking
compatibility, but fixing them would not be a constructive thing to do,
because the packages that still use dbus-glib are exactly those that
would not migrate to an incompatible new version either.
dbus-glib already has a versioned Depends on a better D-Bus implementation
(part of libglib2.0-0). Next time I do an upstream release I'm seriously
tempted to add __attribute__((deprecated("use GDBus instead"))) to
every symbol.
> The affected packages fail to cross build from source, because they fail
> to execute dbus-binding-tool. What needs doing is moving them to a
> separate package that is marked Multi-Arch: foreign. This is less than
> #873617 is asking for.
>
> I know that you don't want to work on this package. As per constitution
> you are not obliged to do the work. I therefore offer NMUing this patch.
> Please raise your concerns if any.
If it's sufficiently important to you to justify a trip through NEW,
then I'd prefer to do a MU fixing this and #873617 (there seems little
reason to fix this one but not #873617). Thanks for the patch, I'll use
it as a base.
smcv
