Bug#1041646: cinnamon: depends on typelib from unmaintained caribou
Source: cinnamon
Severity: important
Tags: upstream trixie sid
User: pkg-gnome-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
Usertags: oldlibs
Control: block 1041623 by -1
Control: block 1041641 by -1
cinnamon used to have a dependency on caribou, an experimental on-screen
keyboard from GNOME, which was removed in 2013:
> * Remove caribou as dependency. (LP: #1106062)
(ref: <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cinnamon/+bug/1106062>)
but a dependency on at least its GObject-Introspection bindings was
reinstated in the next version, because cinnamon crashed on startup if
gir1.2-caribou-1.0 wasn't installed:
> * Add missing dependency to gir1.2-caribou-1.0.
> (Fixes LP: #1106062 and LP: #1126721)
(ref: <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cinnamon/+bug/1106062>,)
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cinnamon/+bug/1126721>)
I don't know whether the Caribou on-screen keyboard is shown in-process
by cinnamon, or whether cinnamon is talking to it via D-Bus or some other
IPC mechanism. If it's used via IPC, then that's not actually going to work
unless caribou itself happens to be installed (there is no dependency that
would make that happen, as far as I can see).
cinnamon seems to use caribou via Python and PyGI, so it should be
straightforward to make this dependency optional via a try:/except
ImportError: block, which would allow the dependency to be reduced to
a Suggests or nothing at all. GNOME Shell had similar handling for the
Telepathy framework for a while, although in JS rather than Python:
code to use it still existed, but it was runtime-optional.
The reason I'm raising this is that caribou was archived upstream
(#1041641) and depends on the unmaintained clutter-1.0 framework
(#1041623), so any bugs in it are not going to be fixed any more unless
someone (presumably from the cinnamon community) takes over the
responsibility for its upstream maintenance. In the absence of an upstream
maintainer, I don't think caribou should be included in trixie.
smcv
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