[Pkg-xmpp-devel] Bug#1112230: spectrum2: Build-Depends (unnecessarily?) on deprecated dbus-glib

[Simon McVittie]

Source: spectrum2
Severity: normal
Tags: sid forky
Control: block 895291 by -1
User: pkg-utopia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: dbus-glib-deprecation

This package appears to build-depend on dbus-glib (libdbus-glib-1-dev, 
libdbus-glib-1-2). I'm unsure why: a quick look at codesearch.debian.net 
does not show any uses of its APIs. Perhaps this dependency is 
unnecessary and can simply be removed?

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