Bug#1147651: RM: gfsview -- RoQA; unbuildable since removal of libosmesa

[Simon McVittie]

Package: ftp.debian.org
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: gfsview at packages.debian.org mesa at packages.debian.org
Control: affects -1 + src:gfsview
User: ftp.debian.org at packages.debian.org
Usertags: remove

gfsview requires Mesa's libosmesa, which was removed in 2025 (Mesa 
25.1.0) and is no longer available. The most recent version of Mesa that 
still built libosmesa used llvm-toolchain-19, so this is one of the 
factors keeping llvm-toolchain-19 in unstable.

The most recent maintainer-team upload of gfsview was in 2023, to delete 
the actual gfsview GUI, which required GTK 2. There have been no updates 
to the upstream source since the initial upload in 2014, and the 
upstream project shows no activity since 2013. There are no 
reverse-dependencies.

If gfsview is still desired in Debian, I think the only way to provide 
it would be to introduce the equivalent of Ubuntu's src:mesa-compat (a 
separate source package containing an outdated version of Mesa) after 
which gfsview and its dependency gnome-chemistry-utils could be 
re-introduced; but in the absence of anyone interested in doing that, I 
think these packages should be removed.

    smcv