Bug#1054155: gnome-clocks: Missing dependency on libgtk-4-media-gstreamer

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 gnome-clocks: Missing dependency on libgtk-4-media-gstreamer

On Wed, 18 Oct 2023 at 08:41:49 -0400, Jeremy Bícha wrote:
> GTK4 (specifically libgtk-4-1) Recommends libgtk-4-media-streamer.
> Please install Recommends or you will experience unusual bugs like
> this one.
> 
> Marco, I see that you made that dependency a Recommends in gtk4
> 4.10.1+ds-2. Should we make it a Depends instead?

That would be a circular dependency: libgtk-4-media-gstreamer links to GTK 4
and therefore Depends on libgtk-4-1.

However, the contents of libgtk-4-media-gstreamer can't simply be included
in libgtk-4-1 without a Policy violation, because they don't include the
SONAME in their installation path, causing trouble for a hypothetical
future libgtk-4-2 (although I hope that in practice, libgtk-4-1 will be
the only SONAME used until it's superseded by GTK 5).

In the short term, I think a Recommends in libgtk-4-1, and a Depends in
packages like this one that are known to be active users of the media
parts of the API, is probably proportionate.

In the longer term, we could consider making debian/libgtk-4-1.symbols.in
generate a dependency on "libgtk-4-1 #MINVER#, libgtk-4-media-gstreamer"
for dependent packages that refer to gtk_media_* symbols? But the cost
of that would be that gir1.2-gtk-4.0 would probably pick up a hard
dependency on libgtk-4-media-gstreamer, even though only a minority of
GIR users are actually using the media APIs.

That could also cause problems for -ports architectures if GStreamer
starts depending on things like Rust, similar to the situation we have
with SVG support, where we would ideally have a hard dependency on
librsvg2-common but -ports architectures can't accept that.

    smcv