Bug#1147652: RM: gnome-chemistry-utils -- RoQA; unbuildable since removal of libosmesa

[Simon McVittie]

Package: ftp.debian.org
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: gnome-chemistry-utils at packages.debian.org, gfsview at packages.debian.org, mesa at packages.debian.org
Control: affects -1 + src:gnome-chemistry-utils
Control: block -1 by 1147651
User: ftp.debian.org at packages.debian.org
Usertags: remove

gnome-chemistry-utils 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 upload of gnome-chemistry-utils was in 2021 
and there have been three NMUs since then. The most recent upstream 
release was in 2018.

Its only reverse-dependency appears to be gfsview, for which I requested 
removal in #1147651 - if the ftp team goes ahead with removal, then that 
one will need to be processed first.

As with gfsview, if these packages are still desired in Debian, I think 
the only way to provide them would be to introduce the equivalent of 
Ubuntu's src:mesa-compat (a separate source package containing an 
outdated version of Mesa that only builds the libraries that were 
subsequently removed upstream), after which these packages could be 
re-introduced; but in the absence of someone introducing and maintaining 
that package, I think it's time to remove these.

(This was prompted by packages that directly or indirectly depend on 
llvm-toolchain-19 being proposed for autoremoval from testing.)

    smcv