MBF: Removing old GNOME python bindings

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

On 29/07/16 00:20, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (2016-07-28 23:29:00)
>> It is high time that we remove the old GNOME python bindings. We have 
>> had the "new" GObject introspection support since at least Squeeze. 
>> The old ones are completely unmaintained and unsupported.
>>
>> I'd like to get gnome-python, gnome-python-extras, pyorbit, 
>> nautilus-python and pygtksourceview removed from testing for the 
>> Stretch release. Most of the gnome-python and gnome-python-extras 
>> binaries have already been removed. This is the final push.
>>
>> Removing pygtk and pygobject-2 may be unreasonable for Stretch, so if 
>> that can't happen we'll file bugs soon after the Stretch release (or 
>> file them earlier and bump the severity after the release) to get it 
>> done for Buster.
>>
>> For gnome-python{,-extras}, pyorbit, nautilus-python and 
>> pygtksourceview there are 54 reverse dependencies, and only 2 of them 
>> are key packages. One of those (cinnamon) doesn't actually need to 
>> depend on any of these packages and can just drop the dependency, and 
>> the other (hamster-applet) will need to be updated to a new upstream 
>> version or get removed as well.
> 
> The Sugar project is actively working towards migration from pygtk to 
> pygobject but is unlikely to finish that work before the freeze of 
> Stretch, unfortunately.

I see that some of sugar has already been ported, e.g. sugar-toolkit-gtk3. Is
there really no way things can be ported in time? These modules have been
deprecated for years and we'd really like to get rid of them.

Also, I wonder if we really need three versions of sugar. The only remaining
rdep for 0.88 seems to be sugar-moon-activity. That seems unmaintained: we have
version 11 while upstream has 17, and the last maintainer activity was in 2010.
Thus I have filed an RC bug on sugar-base-0.88 to get it out of Stretch.

As for sugar-toolkit 0.98, there's only sugar-calculate-activity and
sugar-presence-service (last upstream activity 2011, package description says it
is deprecated) still depending on it. Maybe we should remove those as well so we
can kill sugar 0.98?

Getting those fixed or removed would mean that we don't have to ship multiple
versions of sugar, and that we can get rid of the static GNOME python bindings.

Cheers,
Emilio