[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] RFH: test your package(s) with new upower

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello!

In preparation for the upcoming upower transition maintainers (and
other volunteers) will need to verify their packages still works.

Why am I stating the obvious?

The new upower version has been sitting in experimental for almost
4 months now for people to test. (On top of this I personally expect
people to keep track on what's going on in their packages upstream
and how upstream changes in packages they depend on are going to
affect them, but that's just me I guess.)

So far *noone* has raised a single word about how the updated
version of upower will be a problem for them.

How you can find out if you're affected?

Thanks to the awesome codesearch service, you can simply visit
the following url to find upower dbus api users:
http://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%28%3Fi%29org%5C.freedesktop%5C.upower

Why don't I trust maintainers there will be no problems for them?

The new UPower version has no replacement for some functionality
provided in the old version. This functionality was a duplicate
of things found in other places, for example consolekit, logind
and others... If everyone tries several mechanism, instead of
simply relying on upower, then we don't have a problem.

The work done so far on trying to verify if maintainers
are keeping a look out towards the future has proven that
this is not something we can rely on.

A simple rebuild test showed that several packages which
used the upower C library client API didn't even build.
Bugs has been filed for that and those are mostly done now,
so what remains is to review the DBus API, which can't
be done as easily as simply rebuilding. You actually
have to test the package to see if it still works as well.
(Or manually verify the dbus api calls used in the code
is still available in the same shape and form.)

What am I wishing for?

I'm hoping this call for action will enlighten some people and
hopefully make everyone test their personal favourite packages
and verify they still works with the new upower.
If they don't please file a bug and pretty please mark your
bug report as a blocker for #751953 to keep track of any issues
found.


(Now lets see how quickly this turns in to a gigant trollfest
like just about any other thread on debian-devel and make me
regret I sent this mail.)

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson