Bug#829777: Build-Depends on unmaintained gnome-common

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity -1 important
Control: tags -1 + sid forky
Control: block 1112389 by -1

A bug was reported against this source package a while ago because it 
used deprecated parts of gnome-common, a collection of autoconf macros 
formerly used by GNOME.

Since then, the entire gnome-common package was deprecated (around 10 
years ago). It is now unmaintained upstream and has been moved to a 
read-only archive, meaning that issue reports and merge requests will 
not be accepted, even if a serious problem is found.

Instead of opening a new bug, I'm expanding the scope of the 
pre-existing bug report to: please remove this build-dependency 
completely.

One popular way to do this is to convert the upstream build system from 
Autotools to Meson (or CMake) which will often make it more maintainable 
and understandable. Meson is now GNOME's preferred build system.

If the upstream developer prefers to stay with Autotools, please replace 
gnome-common Autoconf macros with autoconf-archive Autoconf macros, and 
replace gnome-autogen.sh with a local copy. For more details see GNOME's 
porting guide:

* https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects(2f)GnomeCommon(2f)Migration.html

wiki.gnome.org is also being phased out. If it disappears, use this 
archived copy of the porting guide:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20250829115144/https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects(2f)GnomeCommon(2f)Migration.html

Thanks,
    smcv