[Pkg-privacy-maintainers] Bug#1117054: seahorse-nautilus: Depends on deprecated dbus-glib
Simon McVittie
smcv at debian.org
Thu Oct 2 23:23:51 BST 2025
Package: seahorse-nautilus
Severity: normal
Tags: sid forky
Control: block 895291 by -1
User: pkg-utopia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: dbus-glib-deprecation
mp3splt appears to depend on dbus-glib (libdbus-glib-1-2).
It doesn't directly build-depend on libdbus-glib-dev, but does use
dbus-glib directly, in tool/seahorse-tool.c, as well as having an
indirect dependency via libcryptui.
dbus-glib is a long-deprecated D-Bus library with some significant
design flaws, and is essentially unmaintained. I would like to minimize
its use, and eventually remove it from Debian. There will not be a
version that fixes its design flaws, because that would be a major
compatibility break, and any user of dbus-glib who is willing to port
their application to a newer, incompatible version should instead be
porting their application to a better D-Bus implementation such as
GDBus.
For most purposes, the recommended replacement for dbus-glib is the
GDBus family of APIs in GLib, found in <gio/gio.h>. This does not add an
additional dependency, because dbus-glib already depends on a
sufficiently new version of GLib. A porting guide is available in the
GLib documentation: <https://docs.gtk.org/gio/migrating-gdbus.html>.
Practical examples of porting from dbus-glib to GDBus can be found in
the git history of most older GNOME applications.
Alternatives to GDBus, with different design emphasis and trade-offs,
include sd-bus (systemd's D-Bus implementation), QtDBus (Qt's D-Bus
API), and libdbus (the low-level reference D-Bus implementation).
smcv
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