[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#656230: python-dbus: Recommends on python-gobject | python-gtk (<< 2.10) when it is very rarely needed

[Simon McVittie]

On 17/01/12 15:44, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> Python-gobject is only used in the dbus-python test suite and in
> gobject_service.py.

The reason for the recommendation is primarily to support 
dbus.mainloop.gobject, which is necessary to subscribe to signals or 
call asynchronous methods (unless you use python-qt4-dbus, which 
provides an out-of-tree dbus.mainloop.qt with similar behaviour). I 
consider that functionality to be considerably more "core" than 
gobject_service.

You're right that dbus-python does not itself strictly depend on 
pygobject (the dbus-python-using application still needs to run the GLib 
main loop, somehow), so the recommendation could easily change to 
python-gi | python-gobject-2 | python-gobject (| python-qt4-dbus, even) 
if preferred? It seems wise to recommend some way to make the package 
useful, though, and most of its functionality (including the bits 
described in its own tutorial) is inaccessible without a supported main 
loop.

> Note: Barry Warsaw asked me to file this and he intends to address it.

The python3 branch we've both been working on upstream, which will be in 
the next upstream release, uses PyGI for gobject_service - but that's a 
relatively minor/non-essential use of GLib, compared with the main loop 
glue.

     S