[Pkg-ayatana-devel] Bug#996201: libayatana-appindicator: Provide compatibility for software that depends on libappindicator (Slack)

[Gregor Riepl]

Source: libayatana-appindicator
Version: 0.5.5-3
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: onitake at gmail.com

Dear Maintainer,

Some software vendors provide Debian packages that depend on libappindicator,
without also supporting alternative versions such as libayatana-appindicator.

Specifically, Slack is uninstallable from Debian 11 onward, as the
Canonical/Ubuntu version of libappindicator was dropped.

Ubuntu still maintains their version of libappindicator, so the vendor has
refused to fix their package because they don't care about Debian
compatibility.

It's possible to install libappindicator from the Debian buster archive, but
this is not an acceptable solution for regular users.

Please provide a compatibility layer so users can install Slack on Debian
again. The indicator libraries seem to be fully binary compatible, so a simple
dummy package for libappindicator3-1 that provides symlinks from libayatana-
appindicator3.so.1.0.0 to libappindicator3.so.1.0.0 and libayatana-
indicator3.so.7 to libindicator3.so.7 should be enough.

Quote from the vendor:
> We are aware of these dependencies, but unfortunately Debian is not one of
our supported distros, so I'm afraid we can't change the dependencies to make
Slack work on Debian. For a while, we suspected this could cascade into the
next ubuntu release, and the team would have amended it, but testing on ubuntu
pre-release proved that it seems to install just fine, so the decision was made
to not make any changes.

Thank you.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.14.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)