Bug#1112387: gnome-themes-extra: unmaintained upstream; upstream repository is archived and read-only

[Jeremy Bícha]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 6:57 AM Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:
> In practice the main purpose of this source package in Debian is to
> provide the Adwaita theme for GTK 2, which will have to stay until we
> are able to remove GTK 2 completely.
>
> A few other packages do still depend on this:

The remaining packages are:

- cinnamon https://salsa.debian.org/cinnamon-team/cinnamon/-/merge_requests/16
- phosh https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/phosh/-/merge_requests/134
- squeekboard https://bugs.debian.org/1121573
- qt6-gtk-platformtheme

The qt6 dependency was added recently (
https://bugs.debian.org/1095836 ) . It only depends on
gnome-themes-extra-data and I am guessing this is only for the minimal
file
/usr/share/themes/Adwaita-dark/index.theme

squeekboard has a similar dependency. squeekboard is basically a gtk3
app so I suggested that maybe it could use libhandy and opt into
modern GNOME dark style support. But I think qt6 is at too low of a
level for that to be practical.

Maybe we should have another binary package provide that file. Maybe
we could have it built as a package from our meta-gnome3/meta-gnome
source since I'm not sure of a better package to provide that file.

I agree that we ought to keep the gnome-themes-extra packages in
Testing as long as gtk2 is in Testing. Same for Unstable.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha