Bug#895235: sugar-toolkit-gtk3 FTBFS: devlibs error: There is no package matching [libfribidi0-dev] and noone provides it

[Simon McVittie]

Control: affects 901771 src:gtkdataboxmm src:libgtkdatabox src:osm-gps-map src:sugar-toolkit-gtk3 src:fontforge
Control: severity 901771 serious
Control: tags 901771 + patch

On Thu, 19 Apr 2018 at 23:56:18 -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> The build itself completes fine. If pango were broken, I'd expect a
> lot more bug reports.
> 
> But it's the d-shlibmove command that fails. Note this line in the build log:
> 
> > devlibs error: There is no package matching [libfribidi0-dev] and noone
> > provides it, please report bug to d-shlibs maintainer

On Fri, 20 Apr 2018 at 09:09:12 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> d-devlibdeps basically contains a manual mapping to the -dev packages 
> in such cases, this is horribly fragile.

I was about to clone this bug to d-shlibs, because that's clearly a bug
in d-shlibs, orthogonal to whether anything is wrong with pango1.0; but
<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=901771> was reported
in the meantime, so let's use that one instead.

I'm escalating #901771 to RC, because d-shlibs is clearly
not helping here, and the solution is trivial; see attached
0001-Add-quirk-for-libfribidi-dev.patch, which I have confirmed fixes the
build of src:libgtkdatabox (patches also on the way for the existing RC
bug #897539). I've also opened a bug suggesting that d-devlibdeps should
be deprecated.

> In this specific case the root problem is that using pango results in 
> needlessly linking with libfribidi, which can also become annoying for
> transitions.
> 
> This would otherwise not be a FTBFS-causing RC bug, but it is an easily 
> fixable bug that should be fixed.

Normally, I'd say fribidi should be moved from Requires
to Requires.private (or the Requires.internal proposed on
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105572>, but that doesn't
exist yet) to resolve this while not breaking static linking; and I'd
also say we should augment debian/tests/build to exercise static linking,
to prove that that can still work.

However, libfribidi in Debian doesn't provide a static library
any more, so static linking can't actually work anyway. I've asked
fribidi upstream whether they intend to be only supporting shared
linking, or whether their change of defaults was misinterpreted by
the Debian maintainer of fribidi as having been a policy change:
https://github.com/fribidi/fribidi/issues/83

Either moving this dependency from Requires to Requires.private or
removing it altogether is clearly an improvement, so I think we should
do one or the other, and I'm very tempted to pick one arbitrarily and
JFDI, with the intention of swapping to the other if the result of
fribidi#83 indicates that the opposite would be better.

    smcv