Hi Simon, On So 20 Sep 2026 02:02:07 CEST, Simon McVittie wrote:
Source: libayatana-appindicator Severity: normal Tags: upstream wontfix libayatana-appindicator appears to have been deprecated upstream and now makes applications that use it log a warning:pasystray[6472]: libayatana-appindicator is deprecated. Please use libayatana-appindicator-glib in newly written code.
Writing with my upstream hat on: We have rowed back here temporarily and will continue supporting libayatana-appindicator from upstream side as long as GTK-3 is supported.
While that gives us some time, we need to introduce libaytana-appindicator-glib more and better. Indeed.
I've opened this bug already tagged wontfix, on the assumption that the deprecation is intentional and won't change. I've found this to be a useful representation of intentionally deprecated libraries in the GNOME team, because it provides somewhere to track how many packages need to be fixed before the deprecated library can be removed, and can be raised to serious to trigger autoremovals from testing if the maintainer wants that to happen.
Long term, this makes sense, but maybe it is too early at this point? I will not have to to seriously deal with a transition from libayatana-appindicator to libayatana-appindicator-glib before the Debian 15 release cycle, I fear.
If the intention is to phase this out and eventually remove it from Debian, I think it would be useful to do a usertagged mass bug filing on the packages that depend on libayatana-appindicator, with bug reports looking something like <https://bugs.debian.org/1079406> (which can then be escalated to important and eventually serious as progress is made towards removing it). Would you like help with that?
I think this is too early.The point is that libayatana-indicator compiles-in bits of GTK-3 (GtkMenu). And my understanding is that GtkMenu is not available in GTK-4 anymore. Hence the shift-over to GlibMenu in libayatana-appindicator-glib. But the transition will demand porting work on the renderers side (the indicator-applets) and on the application side, too.
Is there any migration documentation that can be pointed to in bug reports, equivalent to the porting guide mentioned in #1079406?
Not yet.
It would probably also be useful to move the deprecated libraries from
Section: {libdevel,libs,introspection} into Section: oldlibs.
Unfortunately a package maintainer cannot do this themselves: instead
it's necessary to send a request to the ftp team, similar to
<https://bugs.debian.org/1067833>.
Also too early? Maybe.
Are any of the other libraries in the ayatana family deprecated? (Perhaps src:libdbusmenu, which seems to be quite dead at this point?)
libdbusmenu is indeed not maintained much on the upstream side (Canonical Ltd.) anymore. It will eventually die with libayatana-appindiator.
Greets, Mike -- mike gabriel aka sunweaver (Debian Developer) mobile: +49 (1520) 1976 148 landline: +49 (4351) 486 14 27 GnuPG Fingerprint: 9BFB AEE8 6C0A A5FF BF22 0782 9AF4 6B30 2577 1B31 mail: [email protected], http://sunweavers.net
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