[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#947977: Fails to declare API dependencies

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 02 Jan 2020 at 15:04:54 -0800, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Package: xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
> Version: 1.6.0-1
> 
> xdg-desktop-portal-gtk depends on version 2 of the
> MUTTER_SCREEN_CAST_API_VERSION being available but doesn't express
> that dependency in any way.

What's the failure mode when this is missing? I'd expect screencasting
to fail to start (hopefully gracefully) when not in (a suitable version
of) GNOME Shell or similar, but the rest of the portals provided by
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk should continue to work.

Screencasting also requires a suitably recent version of Pipewire,
which isn't yet widespread.

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk has a bit of a weird dual role: it's the GNOME
portal implementation, and it's also the fallback when there is no
more specific set of portal backends for a non-GNOME desktop (because
it happens to be the one that is maintained by the xdg-desktop-portal
developers, and because many of the desktop environments that don't have
their own more specific portal backends are GTK-based, so in many cases
the GNOME implementation is close enough).

Suggests: gnome-shell (>= some suitable version) would express the weak
dependency, but seems odd for xdg-desktop-portal-gtk's role as a fallback.

Perhaps xdg-desktop-portal-gtk should split into -gtk and -gnome versions,
where the -gnome version is more featureful? But I don't think that would
necessarily make anything work better than it already does.

    smcv