Bug#996602: meld: is the dependency on libcanberra-gtk3-module genuinely useful?

[Simon McVittie]

Package: meld
Version: 3.20.4-1
Severity: wishlist

While discussing a system integration issue involving libcanberra-gtk3-module
and Flatpak, I was surprised to find that meld Depends on
libcanberra-gtk3-module. This is a GtkModule that looks for GTK events
such as windows closing, modal dialogs appearing, etc. and generates sound
events for them, each of which can optionally be associated with a sound
effect via a theme.

I'm slightly confused that event sounds are considered more important for
a graphical diff viewer than for any other random GUI application. I could
understand something like a chat app wanting audible alerts, but unless
meld has functionality I was not previously aware of, it isn't clear to me
why sounds would be particularly desirable there?

Is this dependency really needed, or could it be reduced to a Recommends
or Suggests, or dropped completely? I would have expected meld to not have
this dependency at all, not even at Suggests level.

The dependency was added when replacing meld 1.x (GTK 2) with meld 3.x
(GTK 3):

>   * Update dependencies to use GTK 3 libraries and GObject introspection,
>     namely libgtk-3-0, python-gi, libgtksourceview-3.0-1,
>     gir1.2-gtksource-3.0, python-gi-cairo and libcanberra-gtk3-module

but in the GTK 2 version, the only dependencies were python-gtk2,
python-glade and python-gobject-2, with additional Recommends on
python-gnome2, python-gconf and python-gtksourceview2. None of those
seem like things that should have pulled in libcanberra-gtk-module,
which was the GTK 2 equivalent of libcanberra-gtk3-module, so I'm not
sure where that dependency came from?

    smcv