[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#885045: amide: Depends on old GNOME libraries

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello amide maintainers,

Following up on my previous mail to #885045 which was a reply to Gert.

This is what I found when glancing over the code. Once digging in you
might find other things that also needs attention, but from the first
look it doesn't seem to be very much work to do the porting. Hope this
helps...

The gconf related code is in ./src/amide_gconf.c and it contains 3
versions (Windows, OSX and native GConf) that provide amide_gconf_* API
to the rest of the application code. I can't really help you out with
Windows or OSX, so only speaking for the last/native implementation. The
natural choice would be to port to GSettings, which is part of GLib.
AIUI given that gconf is going to be removed, you'll have no way to
migrate settings over since that needs gconf (or atleast not with the
gnome provided conversion method). I would recommend a NEWS.Debian entry
mentioning that user settings are lost and need to be reconfigured on
upgrade (which is unfortunate, but this migration should really have
happened around wheezy/old-old-stable already so not much we
can do about this now).
If you prefer to rename/change the amide_gconf_* name/interface the
callers are found in ./src/amitk_preferences.c and ./src/ui_series.c.

The usage of GnomeVFS is found in src/amide_gnome.c which boils down to
amide_gnome_url_show_with_env(...) implemented using
gnome_vfs_url_show_with_env (...).
For a replacement of gnome_vfs_url_show* you might want to have a look
at g_app_info_launch_default_for_uri (...). For an example see
gnome-open.c in src:libgnome, in particular
https://github.com/GNOME/libgnome/commit/65b35cbbc8d6021ee158a6657266bcbf0a9a81d2#diff-175f3047052f1df9261a604671a362f4
(where gnome_url_show is/was a libgnomeui wrapper around
gnome_vfs_url_show). (The GAppInfo/GIO functionality is also part of
GLib.)

FWIW, GNOMEs migration guide is available at
https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/migrating.html

I see Jeremy Bicha also mentioned gnomecanvas, which I haven't looked
into. That might warrant actually/finally looking into a full Gtk+ 3.x
porting effort. Getting rid of gconf and gnomevfs usage would be a good
start though and should likely be done before attempting a full Gtk+
2->3 port.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson