Bug#870418: How much longer should Shutter remain in sid?

[intrigeri]

Hi,

(status update on top, specific questions for Jeremy and Dominique at
the bottom)

Jeremy Bicha:
> As announced [1], we do not intend to release Debian 10 "Buster" with
> the old libgnome (and related) libraries. As part of this process, I
> am now raising the severity of these bugs.

Almost a year has now passed since I've filed this bug report during
DebCamp17. Shutter is now the only blocker that currently prevents us
from removing 7 obsolete lib*-perl packages from the archive, which in
turns blocks removing obsolete GNOME 2 libraries. Since then, calls
for help were sent to the gtk-perl list (9 months ago) and to
debian-{devel,user}@ (6.5 months ago).

My understanding of the upstream situation [1] is:

 - A patch was proposed by Dominique Dumont 4 months ago, that ports
   file handling from VFS to GIO. Thanks Dominique!

 - As a follow-up to this patch submission, on March 11 the only
   active upstream maintainer of Shutter wrote "I'm not a developer
   and in particular I never learnt Pearl and never worked with GTK
   libraries", cannot review patches, and proposed to give Dominique
   access to the upstream BZR repo so he can fix stuff directly there
   (and de facto become the only person active upstream with
   development skills). Dominique did not reply to this offer.

 - I'm not aware of any WIP to port Shutter away from its other
   lib{gtk,gnome}2-*-perl dependencies (see the list of RC bugs
   blocked by this one for details).

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/shutter/+bug/1006290

At this point, it looks quite clear that nobody has the skills,
motivation and time to take over Shutter development upstream and port
its codebase to non-obsolete libraries during the Buster development
cycle. shutter and lib*-perl packages were removed from testing a few
months ago and it's unlikely they'll be part of the Buster release.

What I'm now wondering is how long we want to keep them in sid.

With my pkg-perl team member hat on, I'm not very comfortable with
keeping, under the team umbrella, 7 obsolete lib{gtk,gnome}2-*-perl
packages in the archive, themselves depending on libraries that have
been declared unmaintained upstream for years. I'm fine with keeping
them in sid a little longer (say, until the end of 2018) if Dominique
thinks that waiting some more has any chance to bring a new Shutter
version that does not depend on these obsolete libraries. Dominique,
what do you think?

Jeremy, what's the plan wrt. obsolete GNOME libraries in sid?

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri