[Pkg-sugar-devel] MBF: Removing old GNOME python bindings

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (2016-08-01 16:43:06)
> On 29/07/16 00:20, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> Quoting Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (2016-07-28 23:29:00)
>>> It is high time that we remove the old GNOME python bindings. We 
>>> have had the "new" GObject introspection support since at least 
>>> Squeeze. The old ones are completely unmaintained and unsupported.
>>>
>>> I'd like to get gnome-python, gnome-python-extras, pyorbit, 
>>> nautilus-python and pygtksourceview removed from testing for the 
>>> Stretch release. Most of the gnome-python and gnome-python-extras 
>>> binaries have already been removed. This is the final push.
>>>
>>> Removing pygtk and pygobject-2 may be unreasonable for Stretch, so 
>>> if that can't happen we'll file bugs soon after the Stretch release 
>>> (or file them earlier and bump the severity after the release) to 
>>> get it done for Buster.
>>>
>>> For gnome-python{,-extras}, pyorbit, nautilus-python and 
>>> pygtksourceview there are 54 reverse dependencies, and only 2 of 
>>> them are key packages. One of those (cinnamon) doesn't actually need 
>>> to depend on any of these packages and can just drop the dependency, 
>>> and the other (hamster-applet) will need to be updated to a new 
>>> upstream version or get removed as well.
>> 
>> The Sugar project is actively working towards migration from pygtk to 
>> pygobject but is unlikely to finish that work before the freeze of 
>> Stretch, unfortunately.
>
> I see that some of sugar has already been ported, e.g. 
> sugar-toolkit-gtk3. Is there really no way things can be ported in 
> time? These modules have been deprecated for years and we'd really 
> like to get rid of them.

Sugar is an environment, where you can execute so-called "activities".  
Hundreds of activities exist, where some of them is packaged for Debian.

Core Sugar components now uses python-sugar3 a.k.a. sugar-toolkit-gtk3, 
but Sugar as an environment (called "Sucrose") is still defined as 
including *both* the modern python-sugar3 *and* legacy python-sugar. 
Many activities have not yet migrated yet, and Sugar without legacy 
support will provide a severely broken Sugar experience.


> Also, I wonder if we really need three versions of sugar.

I believe there is currently 2 (not 3) versions of Sugar in Debian.


> The only remaining rdep for 0.88 seems to be sugar-moon-activity. That 
> seems unmaintained: we have version 11 while upstream has 17, and the 
> last maintainer activity was in 2010. Thus I have filed an RC bug on 
> sugar-base-0.88 to get it out of Stretch.

Thanks.  I simply didn't take time to do that because it involved 
packages maintained outside of the Sugar team (that Moon actitivy).


> As for sugar-toolkit 0.98, there's only sugar-calculate-activity and 
> sugar-presence-service (last upstream activity 2011, package 
> description says it is deprecated) still depending on it. Maybe we 
> should remove those as well so we can kill sugar 0.98?

No.  That package is part of legacy support in Sugar, it is discouraged 
to develop any new activities based on that library, but there are 
hundreds of Sugar activities still depending on it.

Yes, most of those activities are not in Debian - just as most of shell 
scripts depending on Zsh is not in Debian, but it would still be a bad 
idea to kick that package judging from its reverse dependencies (I 
guess: I am not a Zsh user myself).


> Getting those fixed or removed would mean that we don't have to ship 
> multiple versions of sugar, and that we can get rid of the static 
> GNOME python bindings.

Kicking Sugar 0.88 would indeed mean that we ship only a single version 
of Sugar - but kicking python-sugar would cripple Sugar, just as I guess 
kicking gtk2 would cripple GNOME.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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