[Pkg-ayatana-devel] Bug#1148485: libayatana-appindicator: deprecated upstream, superseded by libayatana-appindicator-glib

[Simon McVittie]

Source: libayatana-appindicator
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream wontfix

libayatana-appindicator appears to have been deprecated upstream and now 
makes applications that use it log a warning:

pasystray[6472]: libayatana-appindicator is deprecated. Please use libayatana-appindicator-glib in newly written code.

I've opened this bug already tagged wontfix, on the assumption that the 
deprecation is intentional and won't change. I've found this to be a 
useful representation of intentionally deprecated libraries in the GNOME 
team, because it provides somewhere to track how many packages need to 
be fixed before the deprecated library can be removed, and can be raised 
to serious to trigger autoremovals from testing if the maintainer wants 
that to happen.

If the intention is to phase this out and eventually remove it from 
Debian, I think it would be useful to do a usertagged mass bug filing on 
the packages that depend on libayatana-appindicator, with bug reports 
looking something like <https://bugs.debian.org/1079406> (which can then 
be escalated to important and eventually serious as progress is made 
towards removing it). Would you like help with that?

Is there any migration documentation that can be pointed to in bug 
reports, equivalent to the porting guide mentioned in #1079406?

It would probably also be useful to move the deprecated libraries from 
Section: {libdevel,libs,introspection} into Section: oldlibs. 
Unfortunately a package maintainer cannot do this themselves: instead 
it's necessary to send a request to the ftp team, similar to 
<https://bugs.debian.org/1067833>.

Are any of the other libraries in the ayatana family deprecated? (Perhaps 
src:libdbusmenu, which seems to be quite dead at this point?)

Thanks,
    smcv