Bug#955826: cinnamon: Build-Depends on deprecated dbus-glib, but doesn't need to
Package: cinnamon
Version: 4.4.8-3
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
User: pkg-utopia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: dbus-glib-deprecation
dbus-glib is a deprecated D-Bus library with some significant design
flaws, and is essentially unmaintained. As announced in [0], I would
like to minimize its use, and eventually remove it from Debian.
cinnamon Build-Depends on libdbus-glib-1-dev, checks for dbus-glib-1.pc
in configure.ac, and has #include <dbus/dbus-glib.h> in src/main.c.
However, from a quick check, it seems that its only uses of dbus-glib
are for a few constants with names starting with DBUS_, which actually
come from <dbus/dbus.h> in dbus-1.pc (libdbus-1-dev).
If this is true, please either change it to use libdbus-1-dev, dbus-1.pc
and <dbus/dbus.h> instead, or hard-code the values of those constants
in cinnamon (they are part of the D-Bus "wire protocol" documented in
the D-Bus Specification[1], and will not change) and drop the dependency
completely.
If cinnamon has other uses of dbus-glib that I have missed, please see
[0] for how to proceed.
Thanks,
smcv
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/03/msg00272.html
[1] https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html#bus-messages-request-name
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