Bug#1109429: unblock: gnome-software/48.3-2

[Simon McVittie]

Package: release.debian.org
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: gnome-software at packages.debian.org, debian-gtk-gnome at lists.debian.org
Control: affects -1 + src:gnome-software
User: release.debian.org at packages.debian.org
Usertags: unblock

I would like an unblock for gnome-software to be considered once it has 
had a few more days to bake in unstable - I'm opening the unblock bug 
now so I don't forget, and so that we can make a go/wait/no-go decision 
with as much information available to us as possible. I'm sorry this is 
happening so late, I am not a primary maintainer of this high-visibility 
package but nobody else from the team has been able to devote much time 
to it recently.

This can be deferred to 13.1 by turning this into a trixie-pu request if 
the release team would prefer.

[ Reason ]

- New upstream bugfix release
- Stop advertising outdated software as a recommendation
- Annoy our users less with software-update notifications

[ Impact ]

If not accepted:

#1100084 (one-line packaging change): the "Editor's Choice" panel will 
continue to appear in the UI, recommending a mixture of core GNOME apps 
that we still recommend (but which are preinstalled by the desktop task 
and therefore usually somewhat pointless to advertise like this) and 
outdated GNOME apps that are dead upstream or heading that way (which we 
should stop recommending). This is misleading at best: we have no 
"editor" who has chosen these. Ideally we should come up with a better 
list for Debian 14 and maybe backport it as a 13.x stable update, but 
I am not able to deliver a consensus on what our "editors" have chosen 
on my own, and just hiding the panel seems more suitable for 13.0.

gnome-software#2856, gnome-software#2815 (cherry-picks from unreleased 
upstream gnome-48 stable branch): notification popups about updating apt 
metadata and packages are more insistent than they ought to be, and in 
particular will often pop up during suspend from resume.

gnome-software#2853: app sometimes crashes with a use-after-free during 
shutdown.

[ Tests ]

Manual testing:

- #1100084: after killing all gnome-software processes,
  `rm -fr ~/.cache/gnome-software` and re-launching it, the "Editor's
  Choice" panel is no longer shown.
- gnome-software#2856, gnome-software#2815: I can suspend and resume
  while running the gnome-software frontend without getting a popup.
  I haven't tested what happens when a machine is left for 7 days without
  updating anything, because the quickest I can do that is 7 days :-)
- gnome-software#2853: not tested, I'm unsure how to test the relevant
  code path on-demand.

[ Risks ]

Key package in our default desktop environment, presumably commonly 
depended-on as a source of security updates, and high-visibility.

After mitigating #1100084 by disabling the "Editor's Choice" panel, 
gnome-software logs "Gs  Only 0 apps for curated list, hiding" during 
startup, which might annoy users. (We could patch it to push that 
message down to debug level so it won't be shown by default, if 
desired.)

If fixing gnome-software#2856 and gnome-software#2815 causes update 
notifications to be skipped when the app should have been reminding the 
user to update, we won't find that out for a while.

[ Checklist ]

  [x] all changes are documented in the d/changelog
  [x] I reviewed all changes and I approve them
  [x] attach debdiff against the package in testing
      (filtered to exclude translations and patches; the changes to
      upstream source that were made by the patches are included in
      the diff)

unblock gnome-software/48.3-2
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