Bug#965345: mousetweaks: no longer used by GNOME, should be removed or transferred to a new maintainer

[Simon McVittie]

Source: mousetweaks
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: cinnamon-control-center at packages.debian.org, onboard at packages.debian.org, cinnamon at packages.debian.org

As noted in a recent reply to #956523, mousetweaks is no longer used by
GNOME. At the moment gnome-control-center still Recommends it, but I'm
going to remove that recommendation, because it is no longer useful: since
GNOME 3.34, the mouse accessibility settings in gnome-control-center that
used to be implemented via mousetweaks have become part of gnome-shell
and libmutter, so that they can work in both X11 and Wayland modes.

As far as I can tell from the git history, the Recommends by
gnome-control-center has not really been appropriate for a long time
(and perhaps it was never really appropriate) - it would have been more
appropriate for gnome-settings-daemon to have the Recommends, since it
is g-s-d and not g-c-c that actually ran mousetweaks when those mouse
accessibility modes were requested.

The remaining packages with (weak) dependencies on mousetweaks are
cinnamon-control-center (Recommends) and onboard (Suggests). From
codesearch, it looks as though src:cinnamon-settings-daemon also runs it
(using code originating from gnome-settings-daemon), and src:cinnamon
checks for it. Neither of those appears to have a direct dependency,
even a weak one.

mate-settings-daemon and ukui-settings-daemon also have code inherited
from gnome-settings-daemon, but it's in "#if 0" with a comment about
potentially forking mousetweaks, so it doesn't actually do anything.

I don't think it's necessarily appropriate for the GNOME team to be
maintaining this package any more, since GNOME doesn't use it. It should
probably either be transferred to someone whose desktop still uses it
(most likely the Cinnamon team), orphaned, or removed from Debian. Does
the Cinnamon team want to pick up this package?

Prospective adopters should note that mousetweaks currently has an RC bug
(#956523), and that it only works on X11. It isn't clear to me whether
Cinnamon and MATE are or intend to become hybrid Wayland/X11 environments
like GNOME, or whether they are and will remain X11-only.

If cinnamon-settings-daemon and cinnamon continue to interact directly
with mousetweaks, I think they should probably gain a Depends, Recommends
or Suggests on it, either in addition to the Recommends in
cinnamon-control-center or instead of it.

Thanks,
    smcv