Bug#1109326: epiphany-browser: disable use of orphaned libgranite until/unless Pantheon is packaged

[Simon McVittie]

Package: epiphany-browser
Version: 48.3-2
Severity: wishlist
Tags: forky sid
X-Debbugs-Cc: byang at debian.org, granite-7 at packages.debian.org

While updating epiphany-browser to version 48.5 I noticed that it is 
compiled with libgranite (src:granite-7), which does desktop-specific 
things if running under elementaryOS's Pantheon desktop environment.

Debian is not elementaryOS, and we do not have Pantheon packaged.  
src:granite-7 has been orphaned: its GTK 3 equivalent was originally 
packaged by Ubuntu's Devid Antonio Filoni (presumably for the Budgie 
desktop environment?), but all uploads since 2018 have been by Boyuan 
Yang, who orphaned it in 2022 and has been doing periodic QA uploads 
since then.

I noticed this because the new epiphany-browser fixes two crash bugs 
when running under Pantheon with the libgranite feature enabled, which 
have been there since the GTK 4.17/4.18 cycle (back in March), 
suggesting that this is not a well-tested code path.

epiphany-browser is actually the only thing in the archive that depends 
on the GTK-4-based library granite-7 at the moment - all the other 
packages that use libgranite are still on GTK 3 and libgranite v6.

I think we should consider disabling the feature in the first upload of 
epiphany-browser to forky, to limit the blast radius of any integration 
bugs. We can easily re-enable it if someone actually packages Pantheon 
in Debian.

(For maximum confusion, GTK 4 directly depends on libgraphene and 
indirectly depends on libgraphite, neither of which is directly related 
to libgranite; when assessing the dependency tree please be 
extra-careful you are talking about the right /^libgra.*/ library! While 
writing this bug report, I wrote libgraphite when I meant libgranite 
several times.)

    smcv